Re: State Wars, part XI (was: Revised Charter)
Anselm Baird_smith (Anselm.Baird_Smith@inria.fr)
Tue, 7 Nov 1995 19:25:18 +0100
Brian Behlendorf writes:
> On Fri, 3 Nov 1995, Koen Holtman wrote:
> > M. Hedlund:
> > >[Lou Montulli:]
> > >>In fact, [Dave's proposal] reduces the capibilities such that it is nearly
> > >>unusable for large scale applications such as online shopping.
> > >
> > >I disagree (as a programmer for an online shopping site). I do agree that
> > >an extremely large online shopping site with many stores or large ordering
> > >possibilities might hit an upper limit with the state-info proposal if they
> > >tried to store all ordering info in the State-info: header. This concern,
> > >however, is not pressing for the vast majority of ordering systems, which
> > >accumulate a small number of items in each session.
> >
> > I agree.
>
> Besides, hopefully this "extremely large shopping site" will be sufficiently
> funded and motivated to build a shopping cart Java applet which will store
> everything in a client-side database so none of this information needs to get
> transmitted over the wire more than twice (once at browse-time, once at
> order-time) and there's no limit to what can go in your shopping cart. Oh,
> the Java applet API doesn't have persistant object support - oops! Big
> mistake there. Hopefully the API v2 will fix that...
This doesn't seem to be a blocking problem. I have experienced this
solution with 1alpha3 API, and it seems doable, although the stuff
you'll find at ftp://koala.inria.fr/pub/abs/java/sb.tgz works just
enough to say this ;-)
BTW: the nicest thing about this scheme is that you don't need any
more proxy-defeating stuff in implementing shopping basket.
Anselm.