Chapter 8. State Management

The most significant difference between programming for the Web and programming for the desktop is state management—how you store information over the lifetime of your application. This information can be as simple as a user's name or as complex as a stuffed-full shopping cart for an e-commerce store.

In a traditional Windows application, there's little need to think about state management. Memory is plentiful and always available, and you only need to worry about a single user. In a web application, it's a different story. Thousands of users can simultaneously run the same application on the same computer (the web server), each one communicating over a stateless HTTP connection. These conditions make it impossible to ...

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