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Hello,

I'm an indy game developer using Lua for the first time to script portions of my C++ app. It's very cool.

I'm now wondering if I might use Lua on the server-side to do mysql queries & pass relatively low-frequency & latency-tolerant data to instances of the client app running on the player machines. I write for advice as my experience is primarily win32 c/c++.

The game architecture calls for a publicly available server which can accept connections to receive and transmit data to clients - the client app being written in a combination of portable c/c++ and lua.

Having little experience with Linux server development/deployment, I assume the following two options as primary, with the goal of implementing as much server code in as high level a language as possible (read Lua, Python, etc), while still giving good performance:

1. Linux server runs modpython, and server "app" is written in python, making use of mySQLdb or equivalent. Client app network IO handled by Lua using luasocket. I know modpython is quite common, and so this seems a good option if the server app is to be easily deployed on servers that I don't completely control (even if just for testing).

2. I lease or maintain a dedicated linux server, on which I install LUA, and write the server app in Lua, making use of luasocket and luasql or equivalent. Client network IO handled as in (1). (Will I need to write a C app, embed lua, or can I write the whole app in Lua?)


After exploring various languages, I chose Lua to go with on the client side for a number of reasons, including primarily it's small footprint & this intelligent community with great S/N ratio. I'd rather stay with Lua on the client (than go to Python).

My intuition is that Python is perhaps a more straightforward solution on the server side; am not sure the ease with which I can deploy a Lua server app on a linux server as described in (2).

All advice appreciated.  Thanks!

-thomas blom in austin, tx