posted 19 years ago
IBM used these words with mainframe CICS.
A conversational program sends an entry form to the terminal, waits for the user to hit enter, and then picks up at the next line of code. I wrote one or two, but they are not scalable as they chew up a lot of memory.
A non-conversational program sends an entry form to the termanal and goes away, completely forgetting anything it knew about the user and session. When the user hits enter the form starts up the same or another program with enough information to carry on.
A Psuedo-conversational program stores information about the user and session somewhere outside of memory while the user is looking at the form. When the user hits enter it loads the same or another program, recovers the stored information and carries on. My company was somewhat famous in the early days of CICS for inventing a slick, standardized way to store and recover information with very little developer effort.
These concepts map onto the Internet pretty well. Conversational programs connect to the server and stay connected until done. Maybe an FTP program or a database connection fits this model. Non-conversational is pure stateless with no session object. Static HTML and one-shot CGI might match this. Psuedo-conversational stores user and session information in the web server's session. That's how most people write web apps.
After all that, I'm not sure where you heard the terms, or if any of this is what was meant there. See if it makes sense and lemme know.
A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of the idea. John Ciardi