Newbie Session Discussion: Expiration and Clean Up NO CRONS

Please forgive this discussion, but I’m not sure where to find what I’m
looking for.

I’m coming for a PHP background, where I’ve only ever used sessions for
very
simple storage (serializing when I need a lil’ more structure). Also
I’ve
been using the PHP sessions, which PHP is responsible for cleaning up.

After reading Agile Web D. Development, they made some
suggestions:

  • Don’t store data in the session, but have a separate structure that
    you reference with the session ID
  • Store sessions in the database.

This poses some questions:

  • Can you implement some sort of session cleaning solely through Ruby
    without the need for a CRON job?
  • With this clean up (or even with a cron job) how does one handle
    the
    associated data in the database? How do we prevent these from being
    orphaned, since their session is now gone. Eg. in the book, I think
    they
    were talking about cart information. If you had each cart stored in
    the
    database and referenced by a session id, how do we ensure that that
    cart
    gets deleted when the user’s session expires or is cleaned?
  • How does Rails 2.0 and the default Cookie based session storage
    help/hurt the above? I take it there’s no cleanup? Still, how do we
    clean
    the associated data?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Please bare with the ignorance.

ThanX in advance guys.

Baz L
Web D. 2.0

Please forgive this discussion, but I’m not sure where to find what I’m
looking for.

I’m coming for a PHP background, where I’ve only ever used sessions for
very
simple storage (serializing when I need a lil’ more structure). Also
I’ve
been using the PHP sessions, which PHP is responsible for cleaning up.

After reading Agile Web D. Development, they made some
suggestions:

  • Don’t store data in the session, but have a separate structure that
    you reference with the session ID
  • Store sessions in the database.

This poses some questions:

  • Can you implement some sort of session cleaning solely through Ruby
    without the need for a CRON job?
  • With this clean up (or even with a cron job) how does one handle
    the
    associated data in the database? How do we prevent these from being
    orphaned, since their session is now gone. Eg. in the book, I think
    they
    were talking about cart information. If you had each cart stored in
    the
    database and referenced by a session id, how do we ensure that that
    cart
    gets deleted when the user’s session expires or is cleaned?
  • How does Rails 2.0 and the default Cookie based session storage
    help/hurt the above? I take it there’s no cleanup? Still, how do we
    clean
    the associated data?

Any help would be much appreciated.
Please bare with the ignorance.

ThanX in advance guys.

Baz L
Web D. 2.0
http://WebDevelopment2.com/ http://webdevelopment2.com/