title: What does it imply to call a web service (SOAP over HTTP) stateless?
body: <p>I had a concept that HTTP is stateless, so SOAP over HTTP (for web services) is also stateless. I used to think that <em>state</em> meant “state of the object”. For an example, suppose I have a class called <code>Employee</code> and methods called <code>setSalary</code> and <code>getSalary</code>. If a caller of the web service calls <code>setSalary</code> and makes the salary 1000, then if <code>getSalary</code> is called, the caller should not necessarily get the value 10000. When I tested <code>getsalary</code> and got 1000 (i.e., the value assigned by <code>setSalary</code>), I was wondering how the state of the <code>Employee</code> object was maintained.</p>
  
  <p>The Stack Overflow question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2312969/webservices-are-stateless">Webservices are stateless?</a> mentions tricks like cookies used to maintain state, but since I did not made any explicit effort to maintain state, how was the state of the <code>Employee</code> object maintained?</p>
  
  <p>Please let me know if I have misunderstood the concept of state/stateless altogether.</p>