16. Sessions

The concept of a session is critical to most web-base applications. The reason is simple: the HTTP is sessionless. An HTTP connection begins with an URL request, and it ends with the reply from a HTTP server (in the form of an HTML document). When you shop at a website, each time you click begins a new connection.

However, an eCommerce website gives you the illusion that all activities between log in and log out belong to a ``session''. This illusion is implemented by many techniques, such as server-side files and client-side cookies.

In this chapter, we explore how the illusion of sessions can be done with the CGI::Session module.

You can find documents about CGI::Session online. One good place to start is http://www.cpan.org and search for CGI::Session.