In my previous post about making francotoile.uvic.ca work, I outlined writing a VirtualHost configuration that could successfully rewrite a pear.hcmc.uvic.ca Tomcat URL to francotoile.uvic.ca. It seems, however, that with this configuration, HTTP session information isn't transmitted between Tomcat and Apache. In other words, when using the URL rewritten with the VirtualHost, a new session is created every page load and does not persist. This does not happen when using the original URL (the pear.hcmc.uvic.ca one).

I had hoped to finish this post off with "to fix this, just add...", but, sadly, I've yet to find a solution. Martin has pointed out that both http://mariage.uvic.ca/ and http://bcgenesis.uvic.ca/ , which also use mod_rewrite and mod_jk, handle sessions correctly.

It turns out that both of those sites use cookies, not sessions. Since a cookie is a natural choice in this case anyway - a language preference for the site - I've changed the code in my i18n eXist plugin to use cookies instead of sessions, which does the trick. Martin has suggested to use both in tandem, so that the system tries to use sessions but falls back on a cookie if session are unavailable. I will try to implement this enhancement before my time is up.