Oh definitely. I didn't mean to imply that the Rails team hasn't thought about things like REST. They are huge proponents of that design philosophy. One of the

Oh definitely. I didn't mean to imply that the Rails team hasn't thought about things like REST. They are huge proponents of that design philosophy. One of the big advantages of statelessness is that it scales wonderfully. REST aligns itself with HTTP very nicely. Continuations are a clever compromise between highly stateful applications and stateless HTTP. Ajax and Flex turn your browser into a smart client of sorts, and I think that a RESTful service design can stand independent of any particular client. It allows for many different clients to interact with your service besides just your particular Ajax web page. In that sense continuations would be perfectly suitable in those situations where you need to keep track of state. RESTful services need to stand independent of a particular client front end. Anyway, I think that those principles are complementary and should work well together. Ajax (or some other rich client technology) on the front end and REST on the back. Hmm. I think I may try my hand at writing a small web framework in Lua... that's been kicking around in my head lately.