Re: Lua FAQ has moved to new location!

[Jacob Jay <jacob@...>]

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