Static use of CGILua

[Reuben Thomas <rrt@...>]

Some background:

I'm in the process of designing a SourceForge website for my VM system,
Mite, and I'm intending to use the SF systems as much as possible, leaving
quite a simple few pages of my own. Nevertheless, quite a bit of the content
of my main page especially (project summary, recent news &c.) will be
generated from external content, to avoid having to re-edit a static page
frequently (I already run another web site, www.haskell.org/ghc/, for the
Glasgow Haskell Compiler, which is purely static, and maintaining it is a
pain; www.freepoc.org, which I've updated several times (e.g. with releases
of EPOC Lua!) is so painful, owing to the large amount of JavaScript &c.,
that I dread new program releases for this reason).

The relevant bit:

I thought all along that I should use an HTML preprocessing tool (given that
I couldn't find a Linux web development system that supported some form of
meta-HTML) to allow me to generate static pages intelligently (given that I
want to use the same techniques to maintain my private web pages, which,
unlike SF, are hosted in a place that doesn't have CGI support). But in the
end it seemed that my page content was too simple for the tools I looked at.

Nevertheless, I want to keep a programmatic approach, so I started wondering
about using Lua. Then I remembered CGILua.

So my question is: can CGILua easily be used for static web site creation?
(I don't see why not.) Also, is the Lua 4.0/1 version any closer to
completion (I understand it was mainly a question of translating the
documentation into English; I'm only sorry I can't help with that effort).

I'm also interested in comments from other people engaged in similar
efforts. Also, I've found one system that seems to do the job I want: chpp
(http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/~schani/chpp/), which is intended as a
preprocessor, and includes a built-in language that has hashes and lists. It
can't be used for CGI, though, and it'd be nicer to use a system that can be
used either statically or dynamically.

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | aphorism, n.  a wise lie