Componentized Web Applications

I'll write this up later... here's what I ranted at somebody on IRC.

02:00 <Epitaph> hey dude...
02:01 <Epitaph> did I talk to you before about my neat idea for a way to design web-apps?
02:01 <Epitaph> the way it would render a kind of <div> scaffold for the page with page
                "objects", and each could be updated on the fly via serverside javascript?
02:01 <Epitaph> or
02:01 <Epitaph> javascript that comes from the server? :)
02:01 <Epitaph> dynamic <script> objects!
02:02 <Epitaph> I was just thinking about the way a lot of web interfaces are designed,
                and that would make the web WAY efficient
02:02 <Epitaph> I mean, think about the way most web apps work --
02:02 <Epitaph> they have a crapload of little boxes on the page, say "recent forum
                posts", "new albums", "something else", etc...
02:02 <Epitaph> each of which, to be rendered, has to be queried from a database
02:02 <Epitaph> and each of those boxes require data from a different table...
02:03 <Epitaph> also!
02:03 <Epitaph> when you're interacting with a page, it's likely that you want the page to
                update... BUT, that a lot of the page will stay the same
02:03 <Epitaph> SO
02:04 <Epitaph> if you could have just one of those <div>s update when you clicked it,
                then it would save reloading all those info-boxes all over the page
02:04 <Epitaph> and it would take a lot of load off the database and the webserver
02:04 <Epitaph> basically, you'd only be querying or doing actions for what you wanted to
                update...
02:04 <Epitaph> not the entire damn page :)
02:04 <Epitaph> ALSO!
02:05 <Epitaph> it would let you do really funky things, since the results will always be
                javascript :)
02:05 <Epitaph> you could have popup-alerts... you could DHTML it like crazy...
02:05 <Epitaph> so good :)