Question

We are evaluating the technology to be used for a web based application and some suggestions are to go with RESTful based services approach.
Tech Stack

1) Spring
2) Apache CXF ( JAX-RS)

My questions are

1) How state is managed between requests. For example, a user has been authenticated and now he is making a series of requests lets say going through a paginated report. I would imagine the URL for this will be like

domain.com/reports/customreport/page/1
domain.com/reports/customreport/page/2
etc…

a) Where is the user information & request parameters are stored so that it can be shared between requests.
b) Lets say the result is being streamed, where is Rowset is stored?

Is there a complete sample application something similar to Petclinic that can provide the best practices for such an application.

Answer 1

If you are doing RESTful strictly / properly, then user authentication is done in each request and there is no concept of a session. Each request contains enough context information (in the URL and/or request parameters) to allow it to work independent of a session.

1) How state is managed between requests.

It must be managed by the client.

a) Where is the user information & request parameters are stored so that it can be shared between requests.

User authentication information is stored by the client and provided to the server with each request. The server will recalculate any derived information about the user on each request. Any request parameters that would normally be stored in a server-side “session” must be passed afresh with each request.

b) Lets say the result is being streamed, where is Rowset is stored?

In the first instant, nowhere. The query is reissued each time with a parameter saying where to skip to. If performance was an issue, you could

• read-ahead a few pages of the result set and store them in a server-side cache, or
• tune the database query caching for the query.