So What?

I'm pretty sure that continuation servers will prove to be important. I'm equally sure that Seaside is not a killer app that will suddenly spring Smalltalk into the mainstream. Smalltalk has 30 years of reputation to overcome. In this time, Smalltalk has rarely been more than an academic language with small forays into commercial development. The Smalltalk community is smart and has technical vision, but I've not yet seen the marketing leadership that will break Smalltalk into the mainstream. After 30 years, that's not likely to change.

Continuation servers do have some minor hurdles to overcome:

• So far, the servers require ugly, temporary URLs, because each continuation must have a unique identifier. Users don't like uglier URLs. Like Amazon, Seaside works around this limitation by providing a meaningful piece of the URL, followed by the continuation ID.

• Continuation servers will not scale as well, because saving continuations is stateful and expensive, though if you think about it, the problem is not quite as bad as it could be. Most of the continuations in a server will have common code for the framework. Only the last part of the call stack should be different from one continuation to the next. Partial continuations should provide a good performance boost.

• So far, the best servers are on academic languages. Lisp, Smalltalk, and Ruby may be holding them back. And of course, continuation servers may help break one of those languages closer to the mainstream.

Still, in the end, continuation servers will play a role, because they're a much more natural and powerful abstraction, and they represent a much more natural way to program. Systems continually get more processing power, and both short-term and long-term storage get cheaper. Productivity eventually trumps all else. In the end, continuation servers are fast enough. Higher abstractions make us more productive. If you held a gun to my head and forced me to make a prediction, I'd guess that continuation servers will evolve and break into the mainstream, but not on Java, or a derivative like C#. Such a language would have to simulate continuations. The concept is cleanest and purest when it is implemented on a more dynamic, higher-level language. I'd guess that continuation servers, in a language like Python or Ruby, may well prove to provide the foundation for all web application servers, in some not-too-distant future.