Conversations vs. dialogues

[joans]

The external module of Seam Security defines a dialogue CDI scope to keep state across the various redirects that occur during the interaction of the browser with the service provider and the identity provider.

The behaviour of this scope seems very similar to the standard conversation scope of CDI: the dialogues must be explicity demarcated, a dialogueId URL parameter is used to keep track of the dialogue (similarly to cid for conversations), the dialogue context is stored in the servlet context and not passivated, etc.

What am I missing? What features do dialogues provide that are not available with conversations?

Thanks in advance

[shane.bryzak]

A community contributor wrote the external authentication module, unfortunately he is no longer actively working on this so we can't really answer your question.  Perhaps the conversation scope may have been sufficient for this.