(I'm not asking this to prove a point or be a dick...this is a real issue in a lot of deployments. Java/JSF takes the same approach - it stores the complete state of the user interaction in a tree on the server, and then uses either a cookie or URL parameter to retrieve that state. A coworker and I spent a couple weeks digging into the JSF internals to get it to operate statelessly; the base JSF framework worked fine with a configuration change, but the AJAX framework built on top of it choked miserably.)