Ken MacLeod has a good post on continuation-based web frameworks. One quote I found interesting was this one:
Different "panes" (as opposed to frames, ick) can be in different "threads" of continuation without affecting each other as the user navigates through each request.
As far as I know, this particular feature is unique to Seaside. If anyone knows of other systems that support this, I'd like to hear about it - I'm curious to see how others went about implementing this.
Ken also hints that continuations may be getting more widespread in the future:
The Apache Java Cocoon folks ... implemented continuations in JavaScript within Cocoon Flow.... Python is wavering on the edge of support for continuations; this could be the killer use case for continuations in Python. Perl 6 will have continuations.
I'm very interested in hearing about any projects to bring continuation-based web frameworks to new languages. I'd be happy to act as a consultant on such projects, sharing some of the experience I've gotten over the last couple of years building Seaside and deploying Seaside applications, even if I don't have time to directly contribute code. For that matter, if someone wants to hire me to write a Seaside-like framework in Python, Ruby, Javascript, Java, and so on, I'm all ears; adapting the design to a new environment would be an interesting challenge. I wouldn't expect to be able to reproduce everything the Smalltalk version supports, but I'd be shocked if we didn't end up with something a far sight better than what's available now.
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