How to keep applications stateless

This may be a convoluted question, but I'm trying to get a better understanding of statelessness. Based on what I've read, web applications should be stateless, meaning each request is treated as an independent transaction. As a result, Session and Cookies should be avoided (as both of them are stateful). A better approach is to use Tokens, which are stateless because nothing is stored on the server. So I'm trying to understand, how can web applications be stateless when there is data that is being kept for my session (such as items in a shopping cart)? Are these actually being stored in a database somewhere and then periodically being purged? How does this work when you are using a token instead of cookies? And then as a related question, are the major websites (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) actually stateless? Do they use tokens or cookies (or both)?

Mar 7, 2025 - 09:27

This may be a convoluted question, but I'm trying to get a better understanding of statelessness.

Based on what I've read, web applications should be stateless, meaning each request is treated as an independent transaction. As a result, Session and Cookies should be avoided (as both of them are stateful). A better approach is to use Tokens, which are stateless because nothing is stored on the server.

So I'm trying to understand, how can web applications be stateless when there is data that is being kept for my session (such as items in a shopping cart)? Are these actually being stored in a database somewhere and then periodically being purged? How does this work when you are using a token instead of cookies?

And then as a related question, are the major websites (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) actually stateless? Do they use tokens or cookies (or both)?