Transport-Independent Sessions
A transport-independent session is one whose lifecycle is decoupled from the wire protocol that carries it. The execution-state object persists across SSH, WebSocket, HTTP, and local CLI sockets without being owned by any of them. When a client disconnects or hands off to a different transport, the execution graph is preserved intact — no reset, no corruption, no loss of process tree or memory. The transport is a removable carrier; the session is the durable thing.
What “transport-independent” actually means
Most interactive systems bind state to the connection: close the SSH channel or the WebSocket and the shell, its variables, and its job-control state vanish. cmdop inverts this. The session is addressed independently of its current carrier, exactly as tmux / tmate session multiplexing lets a terminal session outlive the SSH connection that attached to it. The POSIX pseudo-terminal (pty) continues to back the process tree regardless of which client is reading from it, and the messaging layer — modeled on ZeroMQ messaging sockets — reconnects to the same logical endpoints after a transport drop.
How does protocol handoff preserve the graph?
Handoff is a re-binding of carrier, not a re-creation of state. The detaching transport releases its read/write channels; the execution-state object remains live and addressable; an attaching transport — possibly of a different kind — re-binds to the same channels. Because ZeroMQ messaging-style endpoints are identity-addressed rather than socket-addressed, the inbound transport resumes mid-stream against the existing execution graph. A CLI session can hand off to a browser GUI, or a WebSocket to an HTTP polling client, with full continuity. See the execution-state object for what survives, and sessions for the user-facing model.
Disconnect semantics
Disconnect is not destruction. When the last transport drops, the session enters a detached-but-live state; its process tree keeps running and its memory plane is retained. Re-attachment over any supported protocol restores the full context. This is the inclusion criterion that separates cmdop from socket-bound runtimes — state that survives protocol handoff rather than state whose lifetime is the connection token.
Transport independence is what makes multi-actor concurrency possible: actors on different protocols can attach to one session precisely because no single protocol owns it.
Background reading: Steered, Not Replayed — why the live execution graph is steered across handoff, not reconstructed by replay.
TAGS: transport-independence, session-continuity, protocol-handoff, multiplexing DEPENDS_ON: [architecture/execution-state-object]
Cmdop