Jim (below) highlights the problems inherent in stateful vs. stateless.

It's because of the stateless nature of the web that a single processor
system can withstand 100,000 hits per day from 6,000 individual users.
No-one has to maintain the list of users or their logon parameters, and they
disappear from view soon after getting their "fix".
They can come back anytime, and from a programming point of view, they
always start from base zero.
Attempts to track their "state" are reduced to cookie and related
technologies, where we rely on them always coming from the same client
hardware, and never upgrading-changing-deleting their systems etc.

Stateless is attractive to the new generation programmers, because it does
not seem to carry the responsibilities that stateful always has carried.
Just reboot the server, if it seems to have unexplained/misunderstood
problems - the users will probably not even notice - they'll simply refresh,
or try again later. Their mistrust of technology is re-enforced.

Stateful is good and necessary for on-line real-time robust access and
update to data. It takes a load of skilled programmers, and reduces
bandwidth requirements.

But there is a place for both, now and in the future.

My feeling is that we must move the stateful interface (character based,
largely) closer to the stateless one (browser based, rich, graphically
enhanced character based, largely), so that both classes of user are
comfortable switching seamlessly between them.

We're seeing a lot of initiatives to achieve this in the MPE world, and I
welcome it.

Regards

Neil

P.S. MS Spellchecker offered tasteful for stateful......

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Phillips [mailto:[log in to unmask]]

Snip....

The difficulty with an HTML or browser-based solution (and a lot of the
other C/S solutions) is its statelessness.  Not that statelessness is a new
concept.  IBM's CICS and Unisys's DPS were both stateless screen handlers.
What I love about the HP (and others) is the stateful connections.  That's
what makes QCTerm so nice.  It's a GUI interface, but with a stateful
connection.  This, combined with COBOL enhancements will enable us to jazz
up those old applications and design some very nice and elegant new
solutions.