22 3. BUILDING FOR SEARCH ENGINES: FOLLOWING REST
to-peer, like some of the file-sharing services we see today. (After all, the Web is in no small part just file-sharing.)
The more likely option is, of course, to break away from the Web altogether, and force people to download special software to use your application. After all, this is how most applications worked before the Web (and how many still work today)—new software, new protocols, new architectures for every app. There are certainly some good reasons to do this, but doing so breaks you off from the rest of the Web community—you can’t be linked to, you can’t be crawled by Google, you can’t be translated by Babelfish, and so on. If that’s a choice you want to make, you probably shouldn’t be reading this book.
The second major choice was that the Web would be “stateless.” Imagine a network connection as your computer phoning up HQ and starting a conversation. In a stateful protocol, these are long conversations—“Hello?” “Hello, welcome to Amazon. This is Shirley.” “Hi Shirley, how are you doing?” “Oh, fine, how are you?” “Oh, great. Just great.” “Glad to hear it. What can I do for you?” “Well, I was wondering what you had in the Books department.” “Hmm, let me see. Well, it looks like we have over 15 million books. Could you be a bit more specific?” “Well, do you have any by Dostoevsky?” (etc.). But the Web is stateless—each connection begins completely anew, with no prior history.
This has its upsides. For one thing, if you’re in the middle of looking for a book on Amazon but right as you’re about to find it you notice the clock and geebus! it’s late, you’re about to miss your flight! So you slam your laptop shut and toss it in your bag and dash to your gate and board the plane and eventually get to your hotel entire days later, there’s nothing stopping you from reopening your laptop in this completely different country and picking up your search right where you left off. All the links will still work, after all. A stateful conversation, on the other hand, would never survive a day-long pause or a change of country. (Similarly, you can send a link to your search to a friend across the globe and you both can use it without a hitch.)
It has benefits for servers too. Instead of having each client tie up part of a particular server for as long as their conversation lasts, stateless conversations get wrapped up very quickly and can be handled by any old server, since they don’t need to know any history.
Some bad web apps try to avoid the Web’s stateless nature. The most common way is thru session cookies. Now cookies certainly have their uses. Just like when you call your bank on the phone and they ask you for your account number so they
