[cap-talk] an attempt at web-calculus in a paragraph for hackers

[Sandro Magi]

Tyler Close wrote:
> There's another important aspect of the GET operation. In many
> applications, objects have associations with other objects, in
> addition to having methods. The Waterken Server also assigns a URL to
> each association. A GET operation on such a URL retrieves the current
> target of the association. 

For a long time I wondered how rich interfaces could be supported given 
this "linked" style of reflection/navigation. Then you mentioned on the 
wiki that it supports "transclusion", ie. including a page by rendering 
it within another page (have I got that right?) and I got an inkling for 
how it could work. Let's see if I'm close...

I suspect a webmail interface could be constructed by composing a number 
of smaller, self-contained units. For instance, suppose the interface 
consists of a list e-mails in the current folder (default: your inbox), 
a menu of actions (compose, addressbook, folders, etc.).

For the simplest possible implementation: one could create a generic 
component which could fetch a list of e-mails from a mail server, and a 
generic component providing menu options.

These could then be composed by a third component which "transcludes" 
the output produced by the above two into the final webmail front-end 
(kind of like a generic container/panel type in which the other 
components "render themselves"). Further, this "container" component is 
the object the user interacts with. Is this accurate?

Let's see if I'm even close before I ask further questions. :-)

Sandro