Stateless protocol
In computing, a stateless protocol is a communications protocol in which no information is retained by either sender or receiver. The sender transmits a packet (a request) to the receiver and does not expect an acknowledgment of receipt. Each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the communication consists of independent pairs of request and response.
Examples of stateless protocols include the Internet Protocol (IP), which is the foundation for the Internet, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.
A stateless protocol does not require the server to retain session information or status about each communications partner for the duration of multiple requests.
Examples of stateless protocols include:
- Internet Protocol (IP) which is the foundation for the Internet
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.
- A UDP connection-oriented session is a stateless connection because neither system maintains information about the session during its life
Contents
Simplified server design
The stateless design simplifies the server design because there is no need to dynamically allocate storage to deal with conversations in progress.
If a client session dies in mid-transaction, no part of the system needs to be responsible for cleaning up the present state of the server.
Disadvantages
A disadvantage of statelessness is that it may be necessary to include additional information in every request, and this extra information will need to be interpreted by the server.
Stateful protocols
A communications protocol which requires keeping of the internal state on the server is known as a stateful protocol.
A TCP connection-oriented session is a 'stateful' connection because both systems maintain information about the session itself during its life.
See also
- Client-server model
- Computer science
- Communications protocol
- Computing
- HATEOAS
- Request (computing)
- Response (computing)
- Session (computer science)
- Soft state
