Sockets - maintain session

Question

DOes any one know of a good way to maintain a user session over a socket. Here is my scenario:
I have a rich client (swing) that presents users with a login dialog. The login information is then sent over a socket to a server that then sends back some Session object or unique id that is passed to the server each time data is needed. For instance :
socket_conn_wrapper.someMethodCall(sessionId, arg2,arg3);
OR
String session_id = socket_conn_wrapper.login("user","pass");
socket_conn_wrapper.setSessionId(session_id);
socket_conn_wrapper.someMethodCall(arg2,arg3); // subsequent calls will send session id
Is this good practice?

Answer 1

Looks perfectly reasonable. You might want to consider
a few things. (Maybe you already have.)
o Specifics: Generally not a good practive to transmit
passwords, so you may want to dream up some other kind
of handshake.For password protection during transmission i figure that i would utilize that packages that java provides for secure sockets.
o Need a way to deal with a client that dies, leaving
a session open.
This would be done by some sessiion cleaner (Session Manager) that runs withing the server as a daemon. THe session manager might keep session id s in some ccollection that it iterates once in a blue moon and figures out if the client socket associated with the session is is still alive. If not then it gets trashed.