(2005-12-02) Bray Web Continuations

In considering Bruce Tate's Beyond Java, Tim Bray says Bruce claims that the "Continuation" facility, commonly found in Dynamic Language-s, snaps neatly onto the problem of making the Web look like a linear dialogue. Clearly, continuations are kind of hard to understand and not for casual or novice programmers. No problemo, says Bruce, frameworks like SeaSide (layered over SmallTalk) hide the weirdness and let you just carry on an orderly dialogue with a user via a Web browser. In my mind I was screaming "No! No! No!" because I've generally felt that the pain and complexity involved in Object-Relational and object-XML and object-MessagIng mapping outweigh the benefits; that if your application is based on exchanging messages, then the message exchange has to be visible to the application programmer. I'm not alone in having this kind of reflex. Well, it seems that both Ruby On Rails and SeaSide would tend to disagree, and the evidence is building up on their side. Sam Ruby challenges the Scalability of this.

Do any of the Python Web Framework-s use Continuation-s?