posted 22 years ago
I believe that HTTP is a connection-based but stateless protocol. It is connection based because it rides on top of TCP/IP which is a connection based protocol.
Now as others have pointed out the connection is made and then closed after each request in HTTP1.0 (that still doesn't make it connection less) In HTTP1.1, there is the concept of a durable connection (using the same connection across multiple HTTP requests.)
Since the server does not inherently care if two requests came from the same client, it is a stateless protocol. We can add state by using many techniques, some of which include HTTPS (secure and stateful), or by using the HTTP Session Object and rewriting the session key with every URL / cookies e.t.c.
Sanjay Raghavan<br />SCJP2, SCEA-J2EE<br />Moderator - <a href="http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scea_prep" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">SCEA PREP</a><br />Co-Author - <a href="http://www.whizlabs.com/scea/scea.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">SCEA@Whiz</a><br /><i>Where did you sip your Java Today?</i>