state

state: see government.

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state

Political organization of society, or the body politic, or, more narrowly, the institutions of government. The state is distinguished from other social groups by its purpose (establishment of order and security), methods (its laws and their enforcement), territory (its area of jurisdiction), and sovereignty. In some countries (e.g., the U.S.), the term also refers to nonsovereign political units subject to the authority of the larger state, or federal union.

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(1) In object-oriented programming, the state of an object is the combination of the original values in the object plus any modifications made to them.

(2) The current or last-known status, or condition, of a process, transaction or setting. "Maintaining state" or "managing state" means keeping track of the process. This is an issue on the Web, because the HTTP protocol does not maintain state between one page request and the next. A Web site needs to keep track of customers that fill a shopping cart with an item, wander off to another page and then come back to complete the order. Likewise, Webmasters like to analyze the routes users take when visiting their sites. In order to maintain state in a stateless environment, cookie files and server protocols such as NSAPI and ISAPI are used.

Maintaining State with Voice Calls
Because everything is chopped into packets by the network, maintaining "state" is also an issue when voice is carried over the Internet (voice over IP). Techniques are devised to simulate the end-to-end connection of a regular telephone call that would "maintain the state of the call." This would readily allow the call to be barged in on, a requirement in certain call centers as well as for emergencies. See cookie, stateless, IP telephony signaling protocol, Web bug, NSAPI and ISAPI.

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(storage, architecture, jargon, theory)

state - How something is; its configuration, attributes, condition, or information content. The state of a system is usually temporary (i.e. it changes with time) and volatile (i.e. it will be lost or reset to some initial state if the system is switched off). A state may be considered to be a point in some space of all possible states. A simple example is a light, which is either on or off. A complex example is the electrical activation in a human brain while solving a problem. In computing and related fields, states, as in the light example, are often modelled as being discrete (rather than continuous) and the transition from one state to another is considered to be instantaneous. Another (related) property of a system is the number of possible states it may exhibit. This may be finite or infinite. A common model for a system with a finite number of discrete state is a finite state machine.