The Stateless State: Remembering what you were doing five minutes ago on the Web

[ Thanks to jmalasko for this link. ]

""State" and "persistence" are crucial "terms of art" for computing. They are concepts that arise throughout computing, but have meanings hard to understand from outside the domain. Clarity about these is essential for a developer of modern distributed applications.

"In general, "state" refers to information about the current conditions of program execution—runtime data stored in memory. "Persistence," by contrast, refers to keeping data between one program execution and another. In a program which iterates through a table in a database, the database itself is "persistent," but the information about which row is being displayed is "state.""

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