Some new ways to Develop web applications

Its been long since I started working on developing Java based web applications. Quite frankly, developing applications, although critical for earning rice :-) , I am no more enjoying developing them with the MVC models using heavy boilerplate code and scaringly big XML files for configuration.
The typical request response model sounded great for me in the initial days , probably I was used to develop using cgi and later php with code scattered all over the page.
The interest in some different stuff automatically dragged me to Ruby on Rails, and found it really cool, but again the basic approach was same but with emphasis on convention over configuration.

Looks like atlast I found some thing interesting in Seaside , a Continuation based framework in Smallatalk !! Yess.. I wrote it correctly , It is Smalltalk, that language we heard about in our College days.


So whats new about it ? Lets have a look at the following figure



In a typical Struts based or any Action based framework , Control flows from Browser to Action Class (or similar ) for processing some business logic by parsing the request parameters (many framework do this automatically ..but still we are dealing with fields and request parameters) and based upon the result control will be passed to render appropriate page, and this process repeats. This model allows business logic to be written in separate classes .

Now , lets us look at the Continuations based Seaside framework, In a striking contrast with the above approach , we can write our web applications , very similar to the way we write any console based application, like the below pseudo code

1) Get Values From Browser
.... Suspend Processing till user click on Submit
2) Process
3) Display Result
..Suspend processing till user responds with something
4 ....


I found it very different and very intuitive way of developing applications. There is a lot of Buzz around this framework , you too may find it interesting.

Currently I am exploring this framework and finding it a great way to develop the applications. I will write about this further in my future posts.