Session objects in "redundant" environment

[Alan Franklin]

I had a question in an interview recently where they asked something to the effect of - what things would you need to take into account when storing a session object in a "redundant" environment. First thought is to implement the serializable interface in case the session objects are passed between servers, stored to disc, etc... I'm thinking they were also looking for something about synchronizing the block of code that sets the session attribute. Any other thoughts on this? Do the 2 above assumptions make sense to do?

[Bear Bibeault]

"Java UserNineNineNine", please check your private messages for an important administrative matter.

[Himanshu Kansal]

Synchronized I guess it would automatically be being in a servlet.
Storing the state is a good option but Serialization might not help as the JVM restart will kill that. So writing to disc is an alternative.

Further more light can be thrown on it by some expert.

Regards

[Alan Franklin]

Just to be clear, I should've phrased it as "storing an object in the session scope in a redundant environment". So, you have a servlet that calls a business object and passes it the HttpSession object (yes, I know this is bad practice, but humor me for this exercise) and this business object creates some object say "Person" and sets this Person object in the session scope.