> It's similar to the problem with RPC; you should not and can not simply sweep the difference between local and network communication under the rug. It works s

> It's similar to the problem with RPC; you should not and can not simply sweep the difference between local and network communication under the rug. It works small and is incredibly painful in the large. Unfortunately, I can not seem to find a pithy explanation of why this is true. (Perhaps I should write one.) I would be willing to help you write it if you'd like. I understand network disruption, partial failure, and weak/episodic connectivity very well, including scenarios where nodes in a network are required to remain radio-silent for long periods of time. Command-and-control military-style systems are much more general than the Web. Related, automatic code distribution is a sort of Holy Grail in programming language design. It is difficult for many reasons. Even data is a huge problem. For example, if the toolbar buttons on Google Docs suddenly die (like they did for our marketing rep a few weeks ago), then the application can become extremely hard to use. Web applications don't handle this well today, and a cache doesn't really address this well, either, because it could be that the new resource invalidates an older cache. In other words, it is a version control and configuration management problem.