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Main | Next day (Mar 6, 2004) »

Friday Mar 05, 2004

Hard to imagine a worse model for UI development than HTTP.

Comments[2] by Dave in Java
Abstract: Using Smalltalk to Redefine Web Development It would be hard to imagine a worse model for user interface development than HTTP. Would you use a GUI framework where every event from every widget in your application was handed to you at once, periodically, as a large hashtable full of strings? Where every time a single piece of data changed you had to regenerate a textual description of the entire interface? Where the event-based architecture was so strict that you couldn't ever, under any circumstances, open a modal dialog box and wait for it to return an answer?
[...]
For all its limitations, the web is fast becoming the most important deployment platform for many classes of application. The Java, Perl, PHP, and .NET worlds, to name a few, are pursuing it agressively. Many of us are going to have to play their game -- but we don't have to play by their rules.
That's part of the abstract for a talk on Seaside, a Smalltalk and continuation based web application development framework (via James Robertson's blog). Seaside is one of many continuation based frameworks. The more I read about these frameworks the more I become convinced that the holy grail of web development lies in the castle of continuations. I've previously mentioned the two Java entries in the quest for the grail: RIFE and Cocoon ControlFlow. I need to find some time to investigate these frameworks and figure out how they relate, if at all, to JSP and JSF.

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