Monday, December 20, 2004

Part of the conversation between Dave Roberts and Marco Baringer talks about the size of continuations. In the Scheme based system I work on the seralized continuation state varies from a minimum of about 5Kb up to 100Kb for a complex series of 'wizard' style interactions with lots of data being entered. That's quite a lot of state unfortunately. There is quite a bit of room to make them smaller as I haven't optimized that part of the system. I haven't needed to at this stage as the speed is fine. They also compress quite nicely if I want to take that approach. This continuation data is serialized and stored in a database. When a user request is made the continuation is retrieved from the database and called. It's a lot faster than it sounds. An advantage with storing it in the database is any server can load it and call it. No need to service the request on the originating server in a webfarm. It also means that I don't need to keep all the continuations in memory and it survives server restarts. 10:24:42 AM

Rainer Joswig notes that Functional Objects, a commercial Dylan development environment, has been open sourced. The system is being developed further by members of the Gwydion Dylan team. 9:52:50 AM

Dave Roberts and Marco Baringer have been discussing REST and continuation based web applications. They've put a transcript of some of their email discussions online for those interested in these subjects. 9:51:07 AM