Lua & Mobile App Architecture

[Gopalakrishnan Subramani <gopalakrishnan.subramani@...>]

Hi All,

Just curious to know the whether the following is possible with Lua or not. Any alternative feedback is welcome.

1. Does Lua work with .NET Compact Framework on Windows 7 mobile? I mean, I want .NET runtime on mobile not a WinCE/C platforms.
2. Does Lua work with Android mobile on Java Runtime? 
3. I read Lua is officially supported language for iPhone. Does Lua works with Object-C run-time?


If you need more clarification and justification and why questions, here are boring details..You can skip them without reading so. If you have any opinion, please feel free to share.

We are trying to build industry application which is sell-able to the market as a product or service. 
The currently we are using XML as a core technology where we define the configuration which covers almost everything an application needs.

We have Configuration Engines written in different technologies like below.

1. Win32/VC++ (not fully matured, due to development time and lack of dynamic introspection/reflection)
2. .NET/C#(Done)
3. iOS/Objective-C (yet to do)
4. Android/Java (yet to do)

These configuration engines consists of huge set of libraries and UI controls to parse the XML and build the UI from XML. So XML is technology independent and we could launch our product on any technologies including web.

XML itself is not helping us in many places like conditional and rules. So wherever required, we write custom code in C++, C#, Object-C (todo) and Java (todo). In most cases, writing these code sucks since development is consume more time & other overheads like compile and test.

I would like to keep our engine to adapt the Lua instead of XML so that I could write custom operations also in Lua. 

Now, we have problem in deciding run-time.

Our engine written in .NET which may not work with Lua on .NET compact framework (to run on Windows mobile) due to the lack of generation of IL code which Lua or other .NET script language produce at run-time. Even DLR might not work on compact framework. I am not sure whether Lua can work with Android on Java run-time. I recently read that iPhone can support Lua thereafter. Even If we have capabilities to compile Lua to IL code in such a way that it can work on Compact framework would be great.

We use Lua as a glue, not as a main application. The ultimate goal is that, we want to build applications on various platforms like .NET, Objective-C, Android platforms for Desktop PCs,  also make them  work on mobile platforms with the greater support of Lua.


--

Gopalakrishnan,
Bangalore