REST & PLT model: both old news? Was: Re: [PRL] REST?

[John Clements]

Going back to a discussion I had with Sam a few days ago, it seems to 
me that both the PLT model and the REST model are trying to solve the 
wrong problem.  Go to maps.google.com, and you'll see a "web page" that 
is really a network application running on the client computer and 
communicating with its server using port 80.  In fact, it seems that 
this is a "web page" only in the sense that it is launched by pointing 
a browser at a particular URL; it is in no way a navigation of a static 
graph of pages.  Rather, it is an application written in Javascript 
(and therefore loaded transparently) that makes requests of the server 
using the HTTP protocol.

As we move toward this model of web interaction, the software that runs 
on the servers looks less and less like a one-thread-per-user program, 
and more like a simple database server:  Oh: you want the map of that 
region?  Here it is.  Oh: you want the lowest-cost fare under the 
following constraints?  Here you go.

The software that runs on the client side, on the other hand, is not 
constrained by either the need to terminate a per-request thread or the 
need to avoid saving state, and can therefore be written in a 
"regular-old" direct style like any other application.

At this point, it seems to me that the interesting problems in PL 
associated with the web are moving away from "how do I write 
applications on the server?" and toward "how do I dynamically 
distribute and update components that run on the client side?" and more 
pragmatically "How do I write code so that it works on every different 
platform's java/ECMAscript implementation?"

In the way-off future, I can see a different application of the insight 
that continuations give us, when we want to start migrating 
long-running applications from one machine to another.

my purple nickel,

john

p.s.: cc'ing sk for "blast of duh"(tm)
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