Stateless vs Stateful

Question

I\'m interested in articles which have some concrete information about stateless and stateful design in programming. I\'m interested because I want to learn more about it, b

Answer 1

I suggest that you start from a question in StackOverflow that discusses the advantages of stateless programming. This is more in the context of functional programming, but what you will read also applies in other programming paradigms.

Stateless programming is related to the mathematical notion of a function, which when called with the same arguments, always return the same results. This is a key concept of the functional programming paradigm and I expect that you will be able to find many relevant articles in that area.

Another area that you could research in order to gain more understanding is RESTful web services. These are by design "stateless", in contrast to other web technologies that try to somehow keep state. (In fact what you say that ASP.NET is stateless isn't correct - ASP.NET tries hard to keep state using ViewState and are definitely to be characterized as stateful. ASP.NET MVC on the other hand is a stateless technology). There are many places that discuss "statelessness" of RESTful web services (like this blog spot), but you could again start from an SO question.