Hi, nospam.

HTTP is definitely stateless.

More on HTTP here: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616.html

Regards, Erik.

Fundamentally, HTTP as a protocol is stateless.  In general, though, a
stateless protocol can be made to act as if it were stateful, assuming
you've got help from the client.  This happens by arranging for the
server to send the state (or some representative of the state) to the
client, and for the client to send it back again next time.

There are three ways this happens in HTTP.  One is cookies, in which
case the state is sent and returned in HTTP headers.  The second is URL
rewriting, in which case the state is sent as part of the response and
returned as part of the request URI.  The third is hidden form fields,
in which the state is sent to the client as part of the response, and
returned to the server as part of a form's data (which can be in the
request URI or the POST body, depending on the form's method).

To learn more about HTTP as a protocol, see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/

nospam

HTTP is known to be stateless.
However, with the use of cookies, ability to keep connections open and
to pass arbitrary amount of data, we're not far from a statefull
protocol. Sessions make it appeared as statefull.

Stateless.

This is a damn nuisance for many "shopping basket" and similar
applications, so much work goes on to make some add-on to HTTP look as
if it's stateful. Usually this involves cookies, sometimes URL munging
instead.

There's also a very minor way ("persistent connections") in which some
pedant could argue that HTTP is stateful -- but this is just a
performance speed-up tweak, it's not a useful "state" for any sensible
meaning.

Docs are in the RFC here
ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2616.txt
(think this is current - some minor searching will confirm)

As for advice on how to use HTTP, then any primer on simple web back-end
programming shoudl assist you -- any language, not just Java.

As the others said - Stateless.
Web pages are served up in response to a http request.
Data can be sent with the http request - and used by the server to retreive
data for presentation and returned to the user in a http response.
You can learn more by googling and reading tutorials on such things as
'asp', jsp', 'cgi' and 'php' amoung others.

the server remembers nothing. the client can send cookies to remind it
of the state.  

There is this business of keep-alive where you reuse the same socket
which in some sense is state.

See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/http.html

IIRC I link to some RFCs.

Thanks a lot all.