For multichannel support, a channel session is always required between the client and server. All implementations of the multichannel architecture use channel session management, which provides a way of keeping track of the use of the channel that is isolated from an application session. The channel session can be used to build the correct context hierarchies for a series of related operations coming from different applications on the same or different clients.

Channel session management must be realized either by managing the sessions of a channel or by a customer-specific implementation. The advantage of having the channel manage its sessions is that session management may be part of the communication protocol, allowing the channel driver to benefit from open industry standards (for instance, HTTP session management provided by the servlet engine). In this case, the channel driver is required to fire an event for which the CSServer service is the registered listener. The CSServer then fires an event for which the application is a registered listener. This design provides a consistent interface for the application to become a registered listener of events regardless of the session management implementation. To facilitate realizing this design, the toolkit provides the following utility classes and interfaces: