what's the deal with Cookie.setMaxAge(Integer.MAX_VALUE)?

Question

setMaxAge is supposed to control the maximum age of a cookie, so if my intention is to literally set the maximum age possible the logical thing would be doing:

cookie.setMaxAge(Integer.MAX_VALUE);

However this results in no Expires in cookie HTTP header at all, I'm testing it on a WebSphere 7. Setting it to something like 1 year measured in seconds works fine.

Why is that happening?

PS Have just tested on Tomcat7 - Integer.MAX_VALUE results in Max-Age=2147483647; Expires=Wed, 06-Mar-2080 21:30:32 GMT, so it must be something wrong with WebSphere.

Solution 1

Problem is described in http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1PM34869. Cause is a kind of millenium problem: WAS7 writes cookies date as YY, WAS6 as YYYY

Solution 2

instead of setting the max age for a cookie, this setMaxAge method adds the int parameter seconds to the current SERVER date/time and puts this new date/time value to a cookie as its expiration time. Later, when this cookie is sent to the browser, this expiration date is compared to the CLIENT date/time, and cookie gets expired if its expiration date is in past.

so instead of using setMaxAge(int) use method with the date and time.

Comments

[Edd]

Do you realise that you have copied and pasted text from an article written by @Oleg in order to answer the question he asked? javaworld.com/article/2073096/don-t-trust-cookie-setmaxage.h‌​tml