I'm looking to create a web application that's very modular, and was pointed to the actor model by a friend. After investigating it a little, I realised that developing just the back-end using actors wasn't a bad idea at all, but I also came to the conclusion that having client-side actors would be useful: rather than create pages which are manipulated through acting upon basic AJAX requests and responses, I could have full interaction using the same message-passing system the server would be using. By using a full-duplex communication mechanism like Comet (or even something wacky like HTML5 Web Sockets), I could encapsulate everything through message passing, and have the actors themselves generate the page dynamically.
My questions are many. Has this been attempted before? Are there any pitfalls, obvious or not-so-much, which might hinder development? Are there any academic papers, articles or blog posts which attempt to explore this theoretically or explain a little about someone trying this for real? What should I be looking out for—are there any issues with my grandiose plan that I haven't spotted?
Hell, is it a grandiose plan at all, or do people do this all the time?
I've often come up with brilliant ideas which didn't seem so brilliant after a quick Google search revealed everyone else doing the exact same thing. In this case, I can't seem to find anything. Help me out, people: if there's anything out there, I'd like to know before I dive right in.
Thanks for your help.