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Sunday, June 26, 2005

Your Sky Goes Stateless

After a month's experience running Solar System Live as a stateless CGI application, this week-end I cut over Your Sky to stateless operation. Even though it only generates a small volume of traffic compared to Earth and Moon Viewer, Your Sky is by far the most complicated of these interactive CGI applications, as it is implemented as three independent but interlinked server applications, each of which generates links to the others.

The stateless version eliminates the image cache used previously to return custom images to requesters and with it, all need for session persistence--a request processed by one server in the server farm may have the custom images it includes generated by any available server since all the state required to create the image is now embedded in the URL which requests it. If the transition to stateless operation goes smoothly for Your Sky, I'll look at cutting over Earth and Moon Viewer in a week or two.

As with Solar System Live, the new version of Your Sky generates 100% compatible (transitional) XHTML 1.0; not only is this the latest and greatest version of HTML, it is embedded within XML and can be parsed by any XML parser. All of the static support files for Your Sky were converted to XHTML 1.0 some time ago.

Posted at June 26, 2005 23:24