I wonder just how much anyone has heard about this idea:
Continuation based web applications (link via Cincom)
As I understand it, continuations allow your web application to jump forward between states after each button click or link click, when the previous states are always saved, so the “back” button always works.
For example, you can fill a shopping cart, hit submit, and before you confirm just hit back and continue adding stuff to the cart (i.e your page is saved with all the values you entered, and it;s not up to you to prey to the browser gods that everything will still work when you hit back, this is guaranteed). Still, the code on the developer's side stays event driven just as it was before.
If I gather correctly, I'm looking at a mix and match of:
- ASP.Net event model (event driven paradigm), only with full client support of these events?
- UIP application block process model
Now, here's the catch: the mainstream languages, .Net and Java do not support this. What I've listed here is found in languages such as Smalltalk and Scheme.
I wonder if there's a chance we'll see this technology in our side of the fence anytime soon (soon being a very general term here)...