HTTP sessions are an industry-standard feature that allow web servers to maintain user identity and store user-specific data during multiple request/response interactions between a client application and a web application.

HTTP sessions preserve:
  • Information about the session itself (session identifier, creation time, time last accessed)
  • Contextual information about the user (client login state, and other user information the web application needs to save)

This context information is required for load balancing. While SOAP, REST and WEB transports use HTTP sessions implicitly, the APSV transport adds this functionality through a combination of properties that are enabled by default for the ROOT application. For more information, see Enable HTTP sessions for the APSV transport.