If REST applications are supposed to be stateless, how do you manage sessions?

Question

I\'m in need of some clarification. I\'ve been reading about REST, and building RESTful applications. According to wikipedia, REST itself is defined to be Representation

Answer 1

The whole concept is different... You don't need to manage sessions if you are trying to implement RESTFul protocol. In that case it is better to do authentication procedure on every request (whereas there is an extra cost to it in terms of performance - hashing password would be a good example. not a big deal...). If you use sessions - how can you distribute load across multiple servers? I bet RESTFul protocol is meant to eliminate sessions whatsoever - you don't really need them... That's why it is called "stateless". Sessions are only required when you cannot store anything other than Cookie on a client side after a reqest has been made (take old, non Javascript/HTML5-supporting browser as an example). In case of "full-featured" RESTFul client it is usually safe to store base64(login:password) on a client side (in memory) until the applictation is still loaded - the application is used to access to the only host and the cookie cannot be compromised by the third party scripts...

I would stronly recommend to disable cookie authentication for RESTFul sevices... check out Basic/Digest Auth - that should be enough for RESTFul based services.