The Agent runtime passes its servlet and Web service requests to its servlet container, which does the work to maintain state using sessions. Each session holds data associated with a particular client request.

The servlet container associates a unique ID with the session and returns the ID to the client. When another request arrives from the client, the container uses the unique ID to attach the session to the request. A service can maintain state with little effort, since the container handles the mechanics.

This chapter discusses how services manage sessions, how to modify the data in a session, and how to configure session timeouts for a Web service.