RE: Lua Syntax as a Wire Format?

["John Passaniti" <jpass@...>]

> Perhaps I am missing something here. But
> doesn't XMLRPC already do everything you
> would want, in a language neutral manner?
> There are lua bindings for it, too.

XML-RPC is fine if you are concerned about being language neutral.  Of
course, not everyone cares.  If I have two applications that need to
communicate and I have Lua embedded in both of them, then Lua becomes a
*perfect* syntax for communication between Lua-enabled applications.  And
this is true of any language that can at run time efficiency use it's own
syntax to describe data structures.  Perl is a perfect syntax for
communication between Perl applications, Python is a perfect syntax for
communication between Python applications, and so on.

The primary advantage is that you only have to write the code that expresses
the Lua table as code.  And that's pretty easy, considering there is an
example that comes with Lua-- save.lua.

The only time XML-RPC (and related protocols like SOAP) matter is when the
overhead of the protocol matters less than the benefit of being language
neutral.