[Seaside] Continuations - their future?

[Aaron Rosenzweig]

Hello,

I'd like to hear what people have to say about the future of  
continuations in Seaside. I saw a comment from Avi a while ago, that  
has been reposted numerous times in various blogs, which said that  
continuations should be dropped because they can be replaced by Ajax  
and would allow support for Strongtalk.

For me, I'm just getting my feet wet with Seaside and a big reason  
for my interest in the framework is because it *does* support  
continuations. In my heart of hearts, I'm hoping those words were  
taken a bit out of context and things are different now but please  
let me know. I couldn't find additional material on this in the  
archives, at least none that jumped out to me.

I come from a WebObjects background where continuations reign  
supreme, they're called "component actions" in WO lingo. You could  
always create a "direct action", and there are times for it, but  
mostly it just makes more sense to use the continuations approach.  
Almost all web frameworks support "direct actions", those are just  
the urls with a query string of varName=value pairs separated with an  
ampersand. The continuations giving a context to work with makes web  
programming almost like traditional programming. It's nice. No need  
to expose those query strings or generate them either.

In the beginning, when Ajax hit the scene and WO developers started  
dabbling, you had to use "direct actions". Just because we hadn't  
figured out how to deal with all the partial page loads and prevent  
running out of your backtrack cache. Those problems have been solved  
and it is now easy to use "component actions" with reusable Ajax  
components. I'm hoping the same is true with Seaside.

Thanks,
-- Aaron