Any time you work with HTTP, you're esssentially working with a stateless protocol. You send in a request, you get back a response. The server doesn't know if a particular request is the first, twentieth, or five millionth request you've made. It certainly doesn't know if a particular request is somewhere in the middle of a long series of requests, all of which need to be handled in order. WS-Resource Framework proposes a different approach to modeling and managing state in open standards based grids.