Using cookies to support personal channels

You probably know the basic concept of a cookie, which is that it is a personalized chunk of information stored in a user's bowser that your site, and only your site, is allowed to read and alter. They are often used to keep track of a user's preferences so you can adjust your site to their personality. But remember, you should never store highly sensitive information, such as a user's credit card number, within a cookie.

For example, my.yahoo.com knows to display the results of the most recent Red Sox game whenever I visit. (And to display a "Better luck next year" message at the end of the season.) It does this by reading the cookie on my desktop. This cookie could either contain a) A list of my baseball team preferences, or more likely, b) A unique UserID that is used in coordination with a database on Yahoo's server to keep track of all my preferences.

Cookies through the AvantGo Client and the AvantGo sync server work in much the same way. The only difference is that cookies are not stored on the mobile device. They are stored on AvantGo sync server and are associated with the user's AvantGo account. In practice, this should not affect the way you send or receive cookies, except that you cannot use the Javascript document.cookie variable.

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