Stateful Web Services

Question

I\'m building a java/spring application, and i may need to incorporate a stateful web service call. Any opinions if i should totally run away from a stateful services call,

Answer 1

Statefulness runs counter to the basic architecture of HTTP (ask Roy Fielding), and reduces scalability.

Answer 2

Stateful web services are a pain to maintain. The mechanism I have seen for them is to have the first call return an id (basically a transaction id) that is used in subsequent calls. A problem with that is that the web service isn't really stateful so it has to load all the information that it needs from some other data store for each call.