[Tutor] Web development

[Benjamin Walling]

There are two types of cookies: session and (semi) permanent.  Session
cookies are good for the extent of time that a user is visiting your
site.  In some browsers, this includes the entire length of time the
browser is open, so if they visit your site, go somewhere else and come
back, the cookie is still valid.  If you do not set an expiration date,
what you get is a session cookie.  Permanent cookies will stay on the
user's machine until the expiration date that you set.  This means that
if they close the browser, reboot, etc, your cookie is still there.

Generally, web applications are stateless, and you do not know who is
really on your website, you would only know the last time each user
requested a page.  You could then infer who you considered to be on your
site by assuming that anyone that has requested a page in the last 5
minutes is on your website.

As far as logging, you can find the cookie information in your
webserver's logs (IIS, Apache, etc), or you can log page requests
yourself.

You have little to no visibility that they have closed their browser or
navigated to another site.  You can attempt some magic here with
JavaScript, but I don't find it to be reliable.

-----Original Message-----
From: Ronan Lucio [mailto:ronan at melim.com.br] 
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2003 7:53 AM
To: tutor at python.org
Subject: [Tutor] Web development

Hello folks,

Does someone develop web applications in Python?

I'd like to know how can I manipulate users in a web application.
Should I use cookies?
I have read about cookies but I seems that cookies works with expiration
time. So, if it's true, if a user closes its browser, isn't it be loged
on automatcly, once the expiration time didn't end up?

And if I set a little expiration time, will the user be loged for the
next page?

If some could point me to a documentation that clarify my mind, it also
would be great.

Thanks,
Ronan

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