Bring up the topic of stateful and stateless applications and you can guarantee to get a house divided, almost equally on both sides. This leaves the average developer confused - is holding state good or bad? The answer is different : It is inevitable in circumstances and avoidable in certain others. Is session(a means to maintain state) management a matter of choice if one has the discipline. I would say so. Some thoughts at: http://regumindtrail.wordpress.com/2007/05/23/session-management-approach-choice-vs-discipline/ I would like to know the community views on this.

Here's another article on the subject: http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/a/2005/05/session_management.html Peace, Cameron Purdy Tangosol Coherence: The Java Data Grid