Implementing Session Tracking

This article explains how to implement session tracking using two of the simplest & oldest methods available to programmers. I feel that in order to understand the beauty of new technologies that exist today it is often necessary to understand what used to be done before that technology came into being. The techniques presented in this article do not use the new technologies present to implement session tracking, but use some old, tried and tested ways which are extremely popular even today. After reading this article you would be able to implement session tracking using any language, since you would understand the concepts of session tracking rather than some language dependent implementation of session tracking.

Various languages provide higher level API for implementing session tracking. There is a detailed session tracking API available in Java which enables many programmers to get session tracking implemented quickly and easily. But that is not what this article talks about. It focuses on understanding the basic techniques so that you can use it with any language.

To understand this article you need to know 3 things -
1. Familiarity with any server side technology such as JSP, ASP, Java servlets, etc.
2. You need to know HTML very well.
3. You need to know how to access the contents of a HTML Form from within a programming language such as JSP, ASP, etc.