What help do we get from Internet cookie?

As you might know HTTP is a stateless protocol, this means that there is no way to keep a track of the state of the user and the information provided by preceding interaction between the site and the user...where the use of stateless protocols simplifies the server design it will deprive you from so many features,like personalisation, E-commerce websites (Shopping carts for instance) , doing some actions for first times visitors of certains webistes while not making these action for second and third etc.. visit,and saving users preferences... this can all be acheived by the use of cookies.

cookies are easy to configure, and they are client site storage technique so it costy on the server side.

these can be introduced by advanatges, however its not recommended to rely heavily on cookies as some user disable cookies for there privancy concerns, also cookies are device-tied or even browser-tied , so the disavantages can be not a big deal if you dont heavily rely on the cookies 

A cookie is a text file saved to a user’s system by a Web site. This file

contains information that the site can retrieve on the user’s next visit, thereby allowing

the site to “recognize” the user and provide an enhanced set of features customized to that

specific user.

Common examples of such features include

·         displaying site content that is personalized according to the user’s settings,

·         to remember stateful information(such as items in a shopping cart),

·         integrating personal user information (such as username) into site display and layout

·         or to record the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons,logging in,or recording which pages were vidited by the user as far back as months or year ago).

Advantages 

·        1. Cookies do not require any server resources since they are stored on the client. 2. Cookies are easy to implement. 

Disadvantages: 

·        1)Cookies can be disabled on user browsers 2)Cookies are transmitted for each HTTP request/response causing overhead on bandwidth 3)No security for sensitive data

sources:

PHP A Beginner’s GuideVikram Vaswani

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie

http://www.developerscode.com/2011/08/what-are-advantages-and-disadvantages.html

Cheers! 

stored some data in client.in HTML5 you can use localstorage and sessionstorage instead of traditional cookies techniques.

A computer cookie is a string of text that websites place into a browser's memory. It tells the website information about the user and keeps the user from having to repeatedly re-enter this information. Cookies can make browsing and basic web tasks significantly simpler. Cookies can also be used to collect demographic and other personal information, which makes them a privacy concern.

dont count much on cookies, they look to be helpful, but they are extremely dangerous. think to delete them very often from your browsers.