Re: Lua and Google Summer of Code

[Bertrand Mansion <golgote@...>]

Le 21 avr. 08 à 23:11, Matthew M. Burke a écrit :
> FYI---
>
> the funded projects for Google's Summer of Code have just been  
> announced.  Although Lua wasn't an accepted organization this year,  
> Lua is being represented amongst the funded projects:
>
> Maxime Petazzoni will be working on improvements to mod_wombat ---  
> Brian McCallister's Apache module that allows for Lua scripted  
> responses to HTTP requests.  In particular, Maxime will be working  
> on interfacing to  mod_dbd so that you can access (pooled) db  
> connections, etc from Lua scripts.

That's very good news :)

I have tried mod_wombat some time ago and here are the problems I had:

- The cache setting "never" didn't work for me, I had to restart  
apache all the time to make sure my script was updated (on macosx at  
least)
- I was not happy with some environment variables like SCRIPT_NAME  
which were different from what I expected and from what other modules  
like WSAPI return (this could be solved with a WSAPI connector?)
- It's a bore to have to install libapreq2, it would be nice to get  
rid of this dependency
- IIRC, the way GET and POST tables get populated in mod_wombat is  
different from the way other lua modules populate them (WSAPI and  
cgilua for example). This makes porting an application from one  
platform to another very difficult (ex: mod_wombat -> fastcgi)
- It would be nice to have a WSAPI connector now that WSAPI is almost  
ready, but this should be easy to do when mod_wombat gets closer to  
release state.

A mod_dbd would indeed be nice, but IMO the above problems should be  
solved first. Unfortunately I don't know Apache2, HTTP, etc well  
enough to help so that's just my hopes.

Now, from a long time PHP web developer perspective, I think lua has  
more to offer to web developers than PHP in terms of raw power. The  
language itself is a lot cleaner and offers more "features" like  
closures, metatables and anonymous functions to start with. It is  
obvious lua was carefully planned from the ground up, unlike PHP which  
goes in every direction now. Lua is also easy to grasp which means its  
use could spread like fire once the infrastructure is ready.  
Mod_wombat, like WSAPI and its fcgi connector, would be the basis of  
the required infrastructure to allow all kind of interesting things to  
happen for lua on the web, that's why both are very important projects  
in my eyes. I would be very happy to see usage of lua for the web  
grow. With projects like mod_wombat, wsapi and luarocks I see this  
coming :)



--
Bertrand Mansion
Mamasam
Work : http://www.mamasam.com
Blog : http://golgote.freeflux.net