Re: Reasons for a Web Developer to use Lua?

[Chris Babcock <cbabcock@...>]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 2:29 PM, Tim Johnson <tim@johnsons-web.com> wrote:
>> I think LuaJIT+FFI is a tremendously exciting language and offers many
>> things that would be very valuable for a Web stack, i.e. developing
>> Web servers, page templating, etc., especially because with LuaJIT+FFI
>> the code might well run more or less as fast as C code.
>
>  I guess what I had in mind when I started this thread is: what can
>  lua do for me as a web programmer that python can't. Perhaps the
>  answer is some sort of embedded solution?

That's one option. Lua is also the best choice if you have legacy
software you want to expose as a service or if you want to expose a
programming API to users.

Sputnik may look a little like the "20 minute wiki" demo from what was
formerly known as TurboGears, but it's a wiki that lets you do
everything that could be done in TG 2.x... and do it all from the web
interface. Sputnik also smokes anything implemented on a Python MVC
framework in responsiveness despite this additional flexibility. Even
if you don't want to use Sputnik or expose that kind of power on the
web interface, you can still use many of the same components in your
own stack.

Also, using Lua directly as a data definition language is not the same
as using Pickle in Python. Lua is very readable in serialized format,
loads fast, and exhibits stable performance over a well-documented
range of data set sizes. Not that you can't do relational data with
Lua, but you get to make that choice.

There were some good points made about Lua and Apache for the $5
hosting set and I've been assuming you want something MVC-like, but
Lua moves as a CGI language too.

Chris
--
Yippee-ki-yay, coffee maker.