Re: Shocking omission in the Kepler platform

["Yuri Takhteyev" <yuri@...>]

I am wondering why you find this omission so shocking?  When I ran
into the need for a function like this myself, I just added it in my
own app and moved on:

    function escape(text)
        return (text or ""):gsub("&", "&amp;"):gsub(">","&gt;"):gsub("<","&lt;")
    end

This didn't seem like a serious enough issue to be worth a complaint,
so I don't think I complained.  (I was busy complaining about other
things, probably, anyway.)  I imagine other people might have done
with that.

There are many large sites in Brazil using Publique! which is a CMS
based on the older version of CGILua.  I don't know how widely
"Kepler" is used, but it is definitely possible to build real web
applications on Kepler.  As an example, you might want to check out
http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/, which is a Wiki based on Kepler
modules.

Kepler doesn't do everything for you in quite the same way as Rails or
Django, but it's size, it does quite a bit.  In particular, the newest
snapshot adds WSAPI and works with LuaRocks, which both are worth a
look.  LuaRocks in particular, makes it easy to manage packages.  In
case of Sputnik, I now also use LuaRocks to install both Sputnik
itself and to later add plugins.  After installing Kepler + LuaRocks
you can use luarocks to install Sputnik ("luarocks install sputnik")
and you can later use it to for instance add a "tickets" plugin which
would add custom behavior to the wiki, allowing you to use it for
bugtracking.  All it takes is typing "luarocks install
sputnik-tickets".  (I don't advocate the tickets plugin as a solution
for bugtracking - it's really just a proof of concept at this point.)

  - yuri

On Jan 5, 2008 11:28 AM, Matt Campbell <mattcampbell@pobox.com> wrote:
> I was shocked to learn that none of the packages in the Kepler platform
> contains a function to escape special characters in HTML, i.e. to
> replace '<', '>', and '&' with "&lt;", "&gt;", and "&amp;",
> respectively.  I suppose the most logical place to put such a function
> would be in CGILua.  This is especially surprising given that CGILua is
> apparently one of hte oldest packages in the Kepler platform, going back
> to Lua 3.2.  It begs the question:  How much serious web development has
> actuallly been done using Kepler in general and CGILua in particular?
>
> Matt
>

-- 
Yuri Takhteyev
http://sputnik.freewisdom.org/