Am I really the only one wondering about this? Or is my basic structure of the application wrong?
Your assumption of the basic structure is wrong. The HTTP protocol is stateless so you need to use sessions (cookies, and possibly a database) to establish the illusion of persistence. Every new request creates a new instance of the controller that needs to handle it so the instance variables (and the instance) in the previous request are gone.
-Rob
Rob Biedenharn http://agileconsultingllc.com Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com