"While developing a universal email client offering single-point access to all major Internet mail services, Web-based or otherwise, I found my application often had to act as a mini Web browser to interact with mail provider Websites. I stumbled upon the same need for Website interaction while developing XML Web service implementations to facilitate machine access to Websites. These sites often use cookies for state management—that is, to maintain user session data. In both cases, I realized that most Website interaction logic dealt with cookie handling. I also noticed that although both applications performed cookie handling, the logic was quite different and not interchangeable. In response to these limitations, I set out to develop a lightweight general-purpose library devoted to cookie handling. In this article, I share this library with you."
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