I am wondering what the best way is to share authentication, session management, etc. across a web site with both a mobile and desktop version. We are running Tomcat, and prefer to keep the mobile and the desktop sites separate applications on separate nodes.
I have seen similar posts regarding persisting the session throughout Tomcat applications, but I'd prefer to do this through the app alone. I've read about clustering in Tomcat, but that appears to be for a single app running across many nodes.
Is there a common way to do this? How do other sites handle session management across mobile and desktop versions?
if I understand correctly you are implementing you mobile and desktop versions of your site as separate web applications. Sharing sessions across multiple apps is not part of the j2ee specs as far as I know; in addition to that I am not aware of any product that offers the functionality..
..So, that would leave you with the option of implementing your own :)
one obvious approach would be to use the db to store session data instead of HttpSession; I'm not saying this is easy; actually may be a good reason to reconsider the decision of having two separate apps for the same site