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

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.
Comments:

Why not download Squeak or VW NC, install Seaside and take a look?

Posted by James Robertson on March 05, 2004 at 07:49 PM EST #

I'm developing web applications using Java and a continuation based framework. The framework itself is written in Sisc Scheme[1], a Java based scheme, but can call Java code pretty easily allowing both Scheme and Java development. It definitely makes developing web applications easier than the JSP model. It has a couple of downsides however. The first is management of the stored continuations. I serialize them to disk which requires disk space and the time to read from disk. And the other is opposition to having a continuation id in the URL. Neither are showstoppers for what I do though. [1] http://sisc.sourceforge.net

Posted by Chris Double on March 06, 2004 at 04:23 AM EST #

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