On Thu, 2003-07-24 at 17:22, Garrett Goebel wrote: > Perrin Harkins wrote: > > > > The biggest thing the article didn't cover is the ideas > > used by the guys coding the more interactive parts of the > > application to express the state machine implemented by > > each of their modules in a declarative data structure. > > This was largely invented by Adam Sussman, who is at > > TicketMaster now. It was similar to what you see in > > CGI::Application and some of the other frameworks. > > Has anyone written an article on it?
On state machines as a model for web apps? Probably. And there is this article about CGI::Application: http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2001/06/05/cgi.html You can also read the fairly extensive docs for CGI::Application, Apache::PageKit, OpenInteract, CGI::MxScreen, and others. None of these require you to read code. Essentially, people have looked at the core concepts of web applications -- screens, transitions between screens, expected input on each screen -- and come up with various ways to define them with a data structure instead of with code. Whether or not this is a good idea depends partly on what your application does. Apps that do lots of browsing/publishing don't gain as much from this as ones that have lots of interactivity and forms. > I don't have a background in CS. Welcome to the club. This isn't rocket science. > After sifting through google searches I turned up the following > article: > > Essay on Web State Machines by Charles Stross > http://www.antipope.org/charlie/attic/webbook/essays/statemach.html That one seems to be about managing persistent data, which is a different topic. > Interactive Web Applications Based on Finite State Machines > http://www.math.luc.edu/~laufer/papers/isas95.pdf That's more like it. - Perrin
