Sessions

WAS provides support for HTTP sessions as described by the Java Servlet Specification v2.3. HTTP is by design an stateless protocol. Session tracking attempts to associate HTTP requests eminating from a particular client as belonging to a single HTTP session.

The following steps for session tracking are summarized:

1. Before you implement session tracking, become familiar with these topics about the sessions programming model:

   • Deciding between session tracking approaches
     This topic describes gives a list and description of the different session tracking approaches.

   • Session persistence
     This topic describes the benefits of enabling persistent sessions.

   • Distributed session support
     This topic describes how multiple application servers can share a pool of sessions.

   • Session security
     This topic describes security options for sessions, including HTTP authentication.

   • Best practices for session programming
     This topic describes some of the practices to optimize your session programming.

   • Assemble to share session data
     This topic describes how to assemble your applications to share session data.

2. Create or modify your servlets to use session support to maintain sessions on behalf of your Web module. For more information, see Session programming model and environment.

3. Configure session management.

4. Tune session management.