Which are the advantages of the Spring Session compared with Servlet HttpSession?

Question

1. Which are the advantages of the Spring Session compared with Servlet HttpSession?

2. Where should I use the Spring session?

Answer 1

HttpSession

Provides a way to identify a user across more than one page request or visit to a Web site and to store information about that user. The servlet container uses this interface to create a session between an HTTP client and an HTTP server. The session persists for a specified time period, across more than one connection or page request from the user. A session usually corresponds to one user, who may visit a site many times. The server can maintain a session in many ways such as using cookies or rewriting URLs.

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Spring Session

Spring Session provides a transparent approach to resolving the limitations of the HTTP session. It provides central session management without being tied to container-specific solutions (eg Tomcat, Jetty etc.)...

Traditionally HTTPSession is container-specific ie the container will create a session and provide the session ID to the application. This essentially means that if our application is running on a clustering environment, each container will have its own HTTPSession management. Session information is not shared across the different servers. The session-id generated by application server 1 will be unknown to the second application server.

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Spring Session provides transparent integration with HttpSession. This means that developers can switch the HttpSession implementation out with an implementation that is backed by Spring Session.

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Answer 2

Spring Session do more advanced things than Tomcat HttpSession. HttpSession it's used in Servlets and Spring Session can be used in Servlets, RestApi...

Ex: Why Spring Session and HttpSession

Answer 3

HttpSession actually is limited to a certain web container, which means its lifecycles are maintained by a container like Tomcat/Jetty. But when you have a couple of servers (normally a reverse agency like Nginx + several server instances), each server would have its own session, so a user will have to login more than once when successive requests hit different servers (eg Server A for the 1st time and server B for the 2nd time).

Keys to address this problem include:

1.Sync session informations among all server instances or

2.Maintain a global session

Actually Spring session aims at the 2nd solution, providing a global session management framework while supporting extensions with different 3rd-party persistence libraries like Redis/JDBC/In Memory.

Theoretically syncing sessions by yourself is also ok, but hard to maintain and time-consuming.