I wonder if anybody out there in the community has given any substantial thought to how Avalon fits in on the web. Right after PDC'03, I started work on something which ultimately got dropped and never completed. It was intended to be a web application framework that enabled Avalon and Indigo to hook into some web eventing mechanism (i.e. ASP.NET or something similar), to allow for rich web-based UIs.

Basically, you could wire up certain UI events to result in Indigo messages to a web endpoint. This endpoint could have some defined "page" lifecycle, or you might be able to hijack ASP.NET in some fashion to reuse the existing familiar model. Certain types of messages could result in a full client page reload, i.e. the message returned could contain a segment of XAML which would then be rendered in response. You could even envision page reactions which didn't require a full page refresh, sort of a JavaScript-ish thing, for example updating a single field, moving a UI widget, and so on.

It seems you could do this without Indigo (just use raw HTTP and fully take advantage of ASP.NET... you'd of course need to get it to generate proper XAML instead of HTML), but there are so many benefits that Indigo buys you that I think it's worth the extra investment. Getting things to work just right on the client, including dynamic page compilation and tuning the eventing model to have the right level of chattiness so as not to make your UI super sluggish, seems like these would be two of the most difficult challenges. Still lots of potential.

So: any thoughts on this whole thing?