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Tute #20
INT21CN Computer Networks
Tutorial #20
Caution: Under Construction
- The basis of Web commerce is dynamically-generated
Web pages. What does this mean?
- What is a shopping cart application?
- What is meant by state maintenance in the context
of a shopping cart application? What are the two major technologies
which can be used to implement state maintenance?
- What are some of the advantages of cookies over hidden fields? What
disadvantages do they have?
- Under what conditions is a cookie stored on a client system's local
disk between "browser sessions"?
- Discuss the security implications of cookies. In particular, if
someone asked you whether it's safe to accept cookies from Web
servers, what would you tell them, and why?
- Many commercial sites, such as Amazon.com, put the session
identifier in URL Extra Path Information.
Explain the advantage this has over hidden field and cookie-based
systems.
- On many Web Commerce sites (for example, Amazon.com and The New York Times), cookies are
used to authenticate repeated visits to the site. For example, if
you have "shopped" at either of the above businesses, they will set
a cookie so that you can subsequently "one-click" (or somesuch) to
order. It's obviously important that no one else can generate
your cookie, or they could impersonate you. How
could this be implemented?
- (Hard) What controls do the
domain
and
path
specifiers impose on when your browser sends a
cookie to a server? In other words, how are the domain
and path
specifiers interpreted in the browser?
- (Discussion question) There's obviously lots of potential for using
Java and/or Javascript to build a shopping cart application which
runs on the client (browser) instead of using FORMS and server-side
code. Is this a good idea? Why, or why not?
These tutorial exercises accompany
Lecture #20.
See Prac #20 for the practical exercises
accompanying this tutorial.
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Copyright © 2004 by
Philip Scott,
La Trobe University.