session management ON CLIENT SIDE.

[alfonz19]

Well, I have to say, that my question is NOT directly bounded with servlet, but I do not know where to put it else.

There are lots of examples how to deal with session management ON SERVER SIDE. No problem with that. But how to do it, effectively, on client side? By "client side" I do not mean presentation layer (which is often generated on server via servlets etc), but "HTTP client" side.

When I create new HttpSession in servlet, then JSESSIONID cookie is set (or url is rewritten). The next request browser fire, will resend JSESSIONID back to server, identifying session. But what if it's not the browser, who's firing requests. What if I have to do it programatically? Is there a elegant way, how to deal with all those Set-Cookie headers and some session timeouts etc etc.? Or do I really need to handle it on my own by parsing headers etc? (I hope not. :) )

thanks in advance for every hint, guidance, help, whatever.

[alfonz19]

So I found the answer, sharing it with others who's looking for it.

Apache commons solved this in HttpClient:
here's quick intro
A quick intro to HttpClient | Java.net

and here's httpclient home:
HttpClient - HttpClient Home