Access session of another web application

Question

Is it possible to configure two separate web apps (WAR) in a J2EE application (EAR) to access a shared session context?

Further info:

I ended up creating a shared class from the EAR which stored the required information in static members. This did the trick, even if it seemed like a dirty hack.

Answer 1

Not directly. Most containers put each WAR in a separate classloader with the EAR classloader as their parent. Each app's sessions are separate. You can put something provided by the parent EAR in each session. If you need them to share something, make it a EAR function.

Answer 2

As far as i've read and seen, it is not possible to share sessions across different webapps. You can only serialize a session for transfer between instances of the same webapp.

Answer 3

There is no "standard" solution to this. However, many application servers have their own extensions for this. WebSpere has a "Shared session context" option for example.

See here: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wasinfo/v6r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.websphere.base.doc/info/aes/ae/tprs_sharing_data.html