LShift Ltd.

RESTful AJAX Continuations

July 20th, 2005 matthias

I saw Avi Bryant talk about Seaside yesterday. Seaside is quite a neat framework. TonyG and Andy have been playing with it for some time.

Avi mentioned that Seaside’s continuation-based model of web application development is in some sense the anti-RESTful - there is a lot of state kept on the server. It occurred to me though that this doesn’t have to be the case. Implementation details aside, in most cases continuations can be quite compact and hence one should be able to to round-trip them between the client and server, thus removing the server-side state. That is, essentially, the approach taken by WASH/CGI.

What really makes Seaside interesting is the way it allows composition at the page level, and extends this seamlessly to AJAX -style web applications.

It seems like we are only a small step away from RESTful AJAX-style continuation-based web applications.

Entry Filed under: Technology