How good and/or necessary are Stateful Web Services?

Question

What kind of server do you people see in real projects?

1) Web Services MUST be stateless: Basically you must send username/password with every request, every reques

Answer 1

Ideally webservices (and web sites) should be stateless.

Unfortunately this takes very well thought out problem domain, and clear separation of concerns.

I've found that in practice most real-world web sites depend on state even though this limits their scalability.

I've also found that many real-world web-services also rely on state.

Ultimately the 'right' decision is the one that works for the specific problem, so it's probably okay to write a webservice that relies on state, and refactor it later if scalability becomes an issue.