[skywhopper]

You might be interested in reading about Frontier, Dave Winer's outline/tree-oriented scripting language/object database/web server from the 90s:

http://davewiner.userland.com/historyOfFrontier

More context: http://scripting.com/davenet/

A lot of the infrastructure of the current web sprung out of Dave Winer's experiments with Frontier. From RSS/OPML/podcasts to weblogs to RPC-over-HTTP, Dave and his employees at UserLand (which included Brent Simmons and IIRC Aaron Swartz) were pioneers that contributed a lot to the Internet we currently live in.

[escap]

no, Aaron did not work at UserLand. Aaron was involved in the RSS world though.

Frontier is open source, http://frontierkernel.org/ and these day, Dave Winer is rewriting a similar system with node, cf https://github.com/scripting?tab=repositories