Is this stateful web service/wcf service?

Service layer has a login method which 开发者_C百科accepts username and password and returns a unique session id (a guid) if the account is valid.

On subsequent request the same session id will be passed instead of passing username and password, so is this stateful or stateless, because I don't need any state information except the authentication of each request

The client connects, exchanges data, stores it somewhere, and disconnects. Upon subsequent connections the SAME DATA must be passed back to the server. This is not stateful.

In a stateful connection, you would connect, authenticate, and then simply use the service. The server would "remember" you without having to constantly be reminded of your session ID. This is definitely stateless.

I would say it could be considered stateful. The server is storing information regarding your session including client activity (timeout, etc). I could also see the argument especially in the Java world where stateless and stateful Beans are much more well defined.