Best way to detect browser closing/navigation to other page and do logout

Question

I am writing an application in GWT and I need to detect when a user navigates away from my application or when he closes the browser window (onUnload event) and do a logout (session invalidation and few other cleanup tasks). The logout action is performed by a servlet.

I am currently doing this by hooking into the onUnload() event and opening a new window pointed to the logout servlet.

Is there a better way to do this? Any other suggestions are welcome.

Answer 1

Why not just make a very short lived session cookie that is reset with each page load, then add a tracking cookie. When the user returns you notice the tracking cookie but no session cookie. Expire the session and clear everything up at that point.

Pop up blockers will prevent your session clean up when it blocks the onUnload window open, because this is something spammers use.

Answer 2

Looks like GWT does have an event for exactly this.

ClosingEvent.

Looks like you need to implement a ClosingHandler