Code: Ugo Cei: Building Interactive Web Programs with Continuations quoting Phil Windley:
This leads to the question: what if I could write programs for the Web that were ‘structured’ in the programming sense of that word? The result would be Web programs that were more natural to write and easy to read. You’d no longer have to maintain the state of your program outside the language and the data could be kept in variables, where it belongs. The answer is: you can.
I hate the ‘save all state’ model imposed by developing for the web, and have been hoping for a way to do this for a while — and now I know what it’s called ;)
It seems Seaside is the leading continuations-based web-app framework, using Smalltalk, and (as Ugo noted) Apache Cocoon has it too, but there’s a whole load more. Can you tell I haven’t been following web-app development techniques much recently?
Never mind those other languages, though — Continuity looks promising as a Perl framework based around continuations. Perl 6 will reportedly have native continuation support, and Dan Sugalski gives a good write-up of how they’re implemented and their ramifications there.
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