Avi Bryant is the creator of Seaside, the Smalltalk web-framework built on continuations, that has been shining light on alternatives to traditional MVC- and request/response-based frameworks. I heartily recommend taking a look. It might not fit your brain (it didn’t mine), but its sure to expand it.
Now Avi has been interviewed by Geoffrey Grosenbach for the Rails Podcast. (Unfortunately, the audio is pretty grainy.. hang in there for the first few minutes).