As a followup to The State of State on the Web I want to mention stateless servlets, a relatively new feature of the PLT web server that make continuations (even) more usable. Stateless servlets are essentially a kind of servlet with serializable continuations. A serialized continuation can then be stored on the hard disk, in the URL, in a cookie, or using any other mechanism you desire. This gets around the issue of memory consumption that is a concern with normal continuations. I don’t have a lot of experience with this kind of servlet, but Jay’s experience is that they are faster than normal servlets and the continuations are typically less than 100 bytes (and so can easily be encoded in a URL). Very nice!