Investigating stateless and stateful apps

At a high level, applications come in two forms – apps that need data stored and apps that don’t care whether the state of the data is stored. Let’s think about two different scenarios.

When you log in to your Gmail account, or another email service provider, everything stays where it’s supposed to be. You can see the emails in your inbox, the sent messages, the emails in your trash bin, and so on. The application/platform stays how it’s supposed to be because the data is stateful. Now, on the opposite side of the spectrum, let’s take www.google.com into consideration. When you go to www.google.com in a web browser, you always have a fresh start. The entry box to type in your question is there, but the results to the previous question that you asked Google isn’t there. It’s always a fresh, clean slate. That’s because www.google.com is stateless, as in, it doesn’t just...