Re: Writing CGI apps with Lua

[Romulo Bahiense <romulo@...>]

> would you like to share your needs (and maybe solutions) with the rest of us?

I can, but I don't think it will be /that/ interesting.

I have a project that I started using a web server made with Delphi 
(using ICS by François Piette) and the scripts handled with Lua. That 
was cool, but I had some ideas that would be better implemented if they 
were managed in the Lua side, due it's dynamic properties, fast proto 
typing and portability. It was easier to implement the webapp in Xavante 
than to build, test and debug an Apache module, for instance.

Then I got CGILua and Xavante. Really great stuff. In Xavante I made a 
considerable amount of changes, some were misbehavior, some proprietary 
features, others potentially buggy/dangerous (e.g.: Xavante considered 
that all UAs would send the headers names in the correct Capital-Case, 
which could not be true) and in some places, that I don't remember right 
now, Xavante also didn't handled UA misbehavior, such as sending an 
ill-formed HTTP header. I talked to Andre about some ideas last year 
(gzip, path handling etc), but I took the hardest-to-share path, where 
my solutions wouldn't be easily adapted to others' needs.

Of the things that could be shared with some work, are stuff like gzip 
compression, If-Modified-Since, a very simple static-file memcache, a 
customized path handler and some other minor stuff, but, again, some of 
them are kind of 'short-circuit' to my needs. For instance, I don't have 
virtual hosts nor I will share the web server with another application 
so no need for sand boxing. I simply cut off those features, saving some 
CPU cycles :)

From CGILua I just took the launchers (albeit I am not using them right 
now, but I am thinking about lighty in the not-so-near future) and 
standard libraries like url-parsing and a modified version of 
filehandler.lua. I had to rewrite post.lua because it just worked with 
venv (I may be wrong on this, but was fun to rewrite it anyway).

Also, I am developing a templating system, /inspired/ by CherryPy and 
RubyOnRails ('inspired' means: absorbed some concepts and did a _very_ 
different implementation), but it is rather immature yet.

As you can see, most of my needs/changes are purely in the area of 
embedded use. It was not that the components were dysfunctional or 
anything, but I just wanted a different path.

Feel free to contact me.

Romulo.