I therefore thought about designing my own system. It seemed natural to take an object-oriented view of things, with Web pages viewed as objects resident on our server, capable of emitting their own HTML on request, and of updating their state when presented with data from the user or other objects. This idea was already in the air with systems like the Geometry Center's W3Kit [Geometry Center W3Kit].
In addition, I found I could conceptualise these objects in terms of System Limit Programming (SLP), a new programming paradigm for describing, in very general terms, systems of interacting components. Here, the components are Web pages and parts of Web pages. There are various problems with conventional object-oriented programming that make it hard to use, and SLP may offer solutions to these. I described these briefly in an earlier paper [Ireson-Paine 1995].
The result of this was Web-O-Matic, or WOM for short.