lua-users home
lua-l archive

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]


I'm cross-posting this to the Kepler list, in case anyone there wants to add to this all-important question for Steve's Lua FAQ. http://batbytes.com/luafaq


On 4 Sep 2009, at 1:24 PM, steve donovan wrote:

3.9 Can Lua be used as a Web scripting language?

The Kepler Project is dedicated to making Lua a first-class citizen of
the Web development world.


I've tweaked the question, for what I think is a more useful one, as the subject could do with some positive reinforcement! (You could distinguish between web-development and web-scripting, but I think promoting Lua for 'web scripting' will only do it a dis-service…)

--

3.9 Is Lua a good web development environment?

Web applications built in Lua customarily perform better than their more common PHP and ROR brethren. Historically Lua has lacked good web development support with only basic CGI execution, however Lua now benefits from the broad functionality developed as the <a href="http://www.keplerproject.org/ ">Kepler Project</a>, including a MVC framework, SQL database drivers, templating, XML parsing, etc.

Serving Lua web applications can be done through FastCGI or vanilla CGI, with most web servers including Lighttpd, Apache, and Kepler's own Lua server, Xavante.

For something simpler to get started with you could instead try <a href="http://haserl.sourceforge.net/";>Haserl</a>, a standalone CGI- based dynamic Lua page parser that you can just drop into the cgi-bin of any webhost (after you've asked them to install Lua).


--

I'll have something further to add to this at some point :) If anyone has some positive web-server stats we could amortise, it would be really good to include them to hit home performance benefits.

As this is my first post to the lists, I'll hide an introduction down here. I have a background in web-development and have been dabbling in sw-development for the past few years. But I'm no programmer and ever since the demise of HyperTalk, I've been looking for something powerful, portable and syntactically easy on the eye. Lua is just that -- and I'm now building a large-scale web-app using it, thanks to a jump start from Kepler.

Hopefully in future I shall contribute back to Lua, but for now I'm still 'dabbling'!
=Jacob