Inverting back the inversion of control or, continuations versus page-centric programming

Abstract

Our thesis is that programming web applications with continuations is superior to the current page-centric technology. A continuation is a program-level manageable value representing the rest of the computation of the program. "What to do next" is precisely what has to be explicitly encoded in order to program non trivial web interactions. Continuations allow web applications to be written in direct style that is, as a single program that displays forms and reads form submission since continuations automatically capture everything (control point, lexical bindings, etc.) that is needed to resume the computation. Programming is therefore safer, easier and more re-usable.