Session (computer science)

In computer science, in particular networking, a session is a semi-permanent interactive information interchange, also known as a dialogue, a conversation or a meeting, between two or more communicating devices, or between a computer and user (see Login session). A session is set up or established at a certain point in time, and then torn down at some later point. An established communication session may involve more than one message in each direction. A session is typically, but not always, stateful, meaning that at least one of the communicating parts needs to save information about the session history in order to be able to communicate, as opposed to stateless communication, where the communication consists of independent requests with responses.

An established session is the basic requirement to perform a connection-oriented communication. A session also is the basic step to transmit in connectionless communication modes. However any unidirectional transmission does not define a session.

Communication Transport may be implemented as part of protocols and services at the application layer, at the session layer or at the transport layer in the OSI model.

In the case of transport protocols that do not implement a formal session layer (e.g., ) or where sessions at the application layer are generally very short-lived (e.g., HTTP), sessions are maintained by a higher level program using a method defined in the data being exchanged. For example, an HTTP exchange between a browser and a remote host may include an HTTP cookie which identifies state, such as a unique session ID, information about the user's preferences or authorization level.

HTTP/1.0 was thought to only allow a single request and response during one Web/HTTP Session. Protocol version HTTP/1.1 improved this by completing the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), making it easier to maintain the Web Session and supporting HTTP cookies and file uploads.

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