[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Amelia A Lewis wrote:
>I want to have an e-commerce website. I do not want to require users to
>"log in" or have to create some sort of fatuous "account" (so that they can
>lose the password, presumably) in order to add items to the cart.
>
>So, there's no username. How do I do this without a session? I don't care
>whether the session is cookies or url-rewritten, but you're making an
>assertion that it's possible to do something that I don't understand how to
>do, and have never seen described.
There are actually quite a few alternatives to this, although, I'm sure I
will get quite a few guffaws from my suggestion.
One way to maintain state on a web site could be done through the use of frames
and JavaScript (I can already see the eyes rolling). State info could be kept
in a topmost frame while the user navigates around other frames. Each of those
can be programmed to take info from the top frame and send it along with any
other form data that is passed between pages. The top frame could also keep
info about what the user has seen, ordered, etc. Without requiring any
commitment to the server.
I'm sure there are other ways of accomplishing this as well. It all depends
on what you need to do, what your limitations are, and who your main audience
is. There is no single solution that will work for everybody.
Chris Strolia-Davis
Database Specialist
Contractor - CDO Technologies Inc.
-----Original Message-----
From: Amelia A Lewis [mailto:amyzing@talsever.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 12:00 PM
To: Elliotte Rusty Harold
Cc: XML-DEV
Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Re: Cookies at XML Europe 2004 -- Call for
Particip ation
On Tue, Jan 06, 2004 at 10:47:12AM -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>At 10:06 AM -0500 1/6/04, Michael Champion wrote:
>> Why is the former bad and contrary to the web architecture, and the
>>latter is a good thing, even though "it is very little used on the
>>web today?" (Why not?)
>
>Today you're asking why web developers are trying to fit yesterday's
>square session based system architectures into the web's stateless
>round hole. The answer is that they're still thinking in yesterday's
>terms. Most web developers don't even ask the question of whether
>their application needs sessions. They assume it does because the old
>style systems did. It doesn't even occur to them to ask whether a
>banking application or a shopping cart could be designed without
>sessions. Eventually they too will learn how web applications should
>be designed, just as database developers and programmers learned how
>to properly utilize those technologies.
All right, I'll bite.
I want to have an e-commerce website. I do not want to require users to
"log in" or have to create some sort of fatuous "account" (so that they can
lose the password, presumably) in order to add items to the cart.
So, there's no username. How do I do this without a session? I don't care
whether the session is cookies or url-rewritten, but you're making an
assertion that it's possible to do something that I don't understand how to
do, and have never seen described.
The requirement is that, for this e-commerce web site, a potential customer
should be able to browse and to add items to some collection object (just
IDs and quantity is fine; let's say everything else is db-retrievable with
that information). Only when they are ready to check out do I want to ask
them for information. If I cannot associate a session with a user, and
cannot expect a user to "create an account" in order to window shop, how do
I do this without sessions?
Amy!
--
Amelia A. Lewis amyzing {at} talsever.com
Belief is the wound that knowledge heals,
and death begins the Telling of our life.
-- Teran Penan [Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Telling"]
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org <http://www.xml.org>, an
initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org>
The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
To subscribe or unsubscribe from this list use the subscription
manager: <http://lists.xml.org/ob/adm.pl>
|
