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On 8/23/07, Thomas Breuel <tmbdev@gmail.com> wrote:
I think approaches like this are fundamentally flawed: you're spending a lot of effort to shoe-horn an interaction into control structures that it takes a Ph.D. to understand and that are essentially black boxes.

Most of computer science is based around the principle of abstraction... Google for Judy Trees/Arrays.  A Judy Tree is basically a glorified hashtable implementation that's designed to be maximally efficient independent of local memory architecture ("cache oblivious" algorithm)... and I believe it's around 20k lines of code.  Extremely complex implementation, but a very easy black-box interface to understand ("everyone" knows what a hashtable is).

If someone can design an *effective* abstraction on top of HTTP that makes it behave like a single thread of execution, then great!  It will be that much easier for the average developer to design an effective web application.  The devil's in the details, though; an imperfect abstraction is going to break down too easily and end up just sucking.  But don't discount an idea just because it's difficult to understand/implement (otherwise, we probably wouldn't have most modern programming languages in the first place).

--
Tom Barta