Generally if you haven’t read about continuations yet, you have to do it now ! There are also good IBM’s articles to understand continuations idea : Crossing borders: Continuations, Web development, and Java programming and Use continuations to develop complex Web applications - really cool stuff.

The basic idea is this: You can let your programming framework load your application’s state before a request and save your application’s state after each request. It may shock you to learn that you can do Web development and get a stateless experience for the user with a stateful model for the programmer. Of course there are not only adventages but you will see that continuations represent a real advancement in web development frameworks and makes you more productive.

Several languages have continuations-based approaches. The most common: Lisp, Ruby, and of course Smalltalk. The most popular continuation server and framework is Seaside. Im writing about it because I’ve just started to use it and I’m really excited about it See Seaside tutorials and videos. Other interesting projects are: Iowa (Ruby framework), Wee (Ruby), Continuity (Perl) or VieWeb (Lisp). Have fun !