What is the purpose of the session scope?

The purpose of the session scope in the Spring framework is to define the lifecycle and visibility of a bean within the context of an HTTP session. When a bean is defined with session scope, it means that a new instance of that bean is created and maintained for the duration of a user's interaction with a web application across multiple HTTP requests and responses. This instance is unique to the user's session and is not shared with other user sessions.

Session-scoped beans are particularly useful for storing user-specific information that needs to be persisted across multiple requests within the same session, such as user preferences, authentication credentials, or any conversational state that should be kept throughout the user's session with the application. This allows for a more personalized user experience and can help maintain state in stateless web environments.

For example, in a Spring MVC web application, a session-scoped bean might be used to store a user's shopping cart. As the user browses the site and adds items to the cart, the session-scoped bean ensures that the cart's state is preserved a...