radical idea - no session tracking!
i'm trying out a 'radical idea' for the exyus framework - no automatic session tracking.
i've spent my entire 'web-programming-life' on the Windows platform. all versions of the IIS web server i worked with had support for session cookies as an automatic feature. in fact, it took me years to figure out that you could turn it off at all! so naturally, when i built my own frameworks, i always included session tracking as a standard part of the system. but now, with exyus, that's not making much sense to me.
i'm doing lots of things to speed the system, take advantage of caching, reduce bandwidth, etc. and one of the things i'm dealing with is 'pipelining' requests. chaining a series of requests - sometimes behind the scenes - as a way to increase scalability without complicating the code. i'm trying to do things in a more HTTP/REST kind of way. and that means i need to improve the 'state-less-ness' of my code. and that means session cookies are getting in the way.
i wrote my code to always generate a new session if a session cookie is not already present. well, now that i'm doing a lot of pipelining, that's generating lots of session cookies that are just useless. i started trying to 'fix' these useless sessions when it suddenly dawned on me - what session cookie is *not* useless? what the heck am i doing with the session cookie anyway? nothing right now. will i ever do something with it? nothing that comes to mind.
so i made session cookies an optional feature in exyus. and turned them off by default. let's see if i ever notice that i don't have them!