By design, web services are said to be stateless, so there is no notion of keeping state in a web service. From the programming point of view, having one or more instances does not make any difference at execution. Though web services are stateless, when it comes to complex or enterprise applications, it is hard to support the required functionality without maintaining state or having the session management support. As an example, consider a banking application where you go to an ATM, insert the ATM card, and start performing some transaction. Internally, it maintains a secure session for you. So operations in a given transaction belong to the same secure session. As mentioned in previous chapters, the Axis2 Web Service framework provides better support for any type of enterprise application. Hence, Axis2 has better support for session management at different levels, which we will discuss during this chapter.
In this chapter, we will discuss Axis2 session management...