Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Continuations for web programming?

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Posted by Don Baccus on
Yeah I caught myself above, we probably cross-posted ...

Continuations do nothing to solve the problem of storing of state. It simply makes the storing of state implicit through the use of language constructs which invoke state-saving and control-flow mechanisms in a way that let you program in a more natural style.

You could, for instance, use our existing session storage and other centralized state-management procedures as the base for implementing continuation semantics in some sort of Tcl+ extension designed to run in our environment.

So that brings me back to my statement above: are web GUIs, at least for the kind of sites you write today and expect to write in the future, complex enough to worry about?

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
(Yes on the cross-posting.)

Some (most?) of the people espousing web continuations definitely seem to be trying to do richer more GUI-like web UI, or trying to make the same code work identically both on the web and on the desktop. So that does seem to line up with Don's, "probably a bigger win for desktop GUI apps" thesis.

On the "are the web GUIs your write complex enough to worry about" question, well, I personally have been spending only small percentages of my programming time on web work of any sort (much less complicated web UIs) for a few years now, so I'm clearly the wrong person to answer that question. But I'm definitely interested in what others think about it, as in Don's posts above. :)