Persisting Data across different WebApps/Sessions

Question

Hello all,
I am developing in an environment where multiple (web & enterprise) applications
are developed and deployed separately to the same clustered WebLogic infrastructure.
The applications are all owned by the same company, and usually co-exist quite
happily. I have a request from the business, for a new application I am developing,
to persist some user info for a logged in user on one application to another application,
acessible to the user via a link on page. The user should be able to click on
a link and access a different application but still have their data available
on the new app, if logged in.
As these applications are separate, afaik they cannot simply share session information
together. I need some mechanism, whereby one application can access the information
in the other application's session. Thus far I have considered these options:
1) Writing a cookie containing the info, this could be retrieved from the other
application, back from the client.
2) Send user data through to the second application via a query string. At the
moment this would be possible as a limited amount of information is required to
be shared.
3) Send unique field, such as userid, through to the second application, then
use this field to retrieve user's details from database shared with first application.
This seems OK in principle but my DBA's and security people may have other ideas.
4) Serialise a user object which could be picked up again by the second application.
As I don't know much about serialisation, where do objects get serialised to,
presumably the server they are running on, is there a particular location, would
there be security manager issues and would this be possible in a cluster?
5) Is there another way for web applications to share information with each other?
Thanks,
James

Answer 1

James,
All of these approaches seem legitimate. It seems like if the data is small,
the URL Query String approach would scale and perform well. However, the database
userid approach would entail a performance hit just like when you use JDBC persistence
for session information.
Additional, stateful session beans store serialized information based upon the
persistent-store-dir in the weblogic-ejb-jar.xml file
See
http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs61/ejb/reference.html#1071686
"James Lawless" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
Hello all,
I am developing in an environment where multiple (web & enterprise) applications
are developed and deployed separately to the same clustered WebLogic
infrastructure.
The applications are all owned by the same company, and usually co-exist
quite
happily. I have a request from the business, for a new application I
am developing,
to persist some user info for a logged in user on one application to
another application,
acessible to the user via a link on page. The user should be able to
click on
a link and access a different application but still have their data available
on the new app, if logged in.
As these applications are separate, afaik they cannot simply share session
information
together. I need some mechanism, whereby one application can access the
information
in the other application's session. Thus far I have considered these
options:
1) Writing a cookie containing the info, this could be retrieved from
the other
application, back from the client.
2) Send user data through to the second application via a query string.
At the
moment this would be possible as a limited amount of information is required
to
be shared.
3) Send unique field, such as userid, through to the second application,
then
use this field to retrieve user's details from database shared with first
application.
This seems OK in principle but my DBA's and security people may have
other ideas.
4) Serialise a user object which could be picked up again by the second
application.
As I don't know much about serialisation, where do objects get serialised
to,
presumably the server they are running on, is there a particular location,
would
there be security manager issues and would this be possible in a cluster?
5) Is there another way for web applications to share information with
each other?
Thanks,
James