fix for correctness (write-through edition)

[simonLeary42]

This is an alternate version of #18. Here I have made every function call write() immediately, removing the need to consider the possibility of pending modifications.

Pros:

• simplicity

Cons:

• web portal code must be updated to remove all uses of write()
  • this is hardly an issue
• it's no longer possible to buffer changes with many simultaneous calls to appendArray, instead you would have to getAttribute, array_merge, setAttribute
  • since the logic around pending modifications is so broken and production is running just fine, it's clear that we aren't making any use of this feature