[ProgSoc] Heritrix

James Andrewartha jamesa at daa.com.au
Thu Nov 19 18:31:15 EST 2009


John Elliot wrote:
> I've been trying to build Heritrix [1] with no luck -- haven't been able 
> to get the svn nor the source bundle to compile with various versions of 
> maven -- but I did stumble upon its HttpState.java [2] source file, 
> which is interesting because it shows precisely what 
> "connection-oriented" state is managed over a series of HTTP requests.
> 
> If HTTP is stateless, why does a HTTP client library have an HttpState 
> class? I swear, I don't get the "HTTP is stateless" thing.

It appears to cover three things - cookies, credentials and proxy 
credentials. Cookies are better explained by Roy Fielding [1] than me, and 
the credentials must be sent with each request. Just because your previous 
request was authenticated, this one isn't unless you send your credentials 
again, therefore it's stateless. [2]

[1] http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/rest-discuss/message/3583
[2] http://rest.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RestFaq#nid5EC

-- 
James Andrewartha



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