Re: Reasons for a Web Developer to use Lua?

[Pierre-Yves Gérardy <pygy79@...>]

Zed Shaw's Tir framework on top of his Mongrel2 server may also be
worth a look. It implements three different paradigms in a very light
package:

* Stateless request-response
* Continuation-based routines (useful for a signup form, for example)
* Long-polling connections for chat and other interactive applications.

-- Pierre-Yves



On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 22:10, Chris Babcock <cbabcock@asciiking.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 12:30 PM, Tim Johnson <tim@johnsons-web.com> wrote:
>> I've been a programmer for 24 years. I have a background (way back)
>> in C and Assembler and about a dozen other languages. These days I
>> do primarily web development using python. There might be a market
>> for me for mobile devices.
>
> If I was planning to do mobile development, I would probably be using
> something like MoSync - http://www.mosync.com/
>
>> I would welcome sincere comments on whether lua might be useful for
>> me. I don't mean to troll for an argument or a language war, but
>> just to see if there might be practical application for me to learn
>> lua.
>
> There have been some similar, but less focused, questions asked recently.
>
> I think the most curious thing about Python MVC frameworks is the
> object relational mapper. While it seems that large numbers of
> programmers in the PHP, Ruby, Java and many other programming
> communities are moving towards key-value stores, object oriented
> databases and document stores - derationalizing data in order to
> improve performance - Pylons and Django have continued with this ORM
> anti-pattern of rationalizing data for storage whether it needs to be
> queried relationally or not. If you happen to like the MVC pattern,
> it's easy enough to use Versium and Saci for your model, Copas for
> your controller and any number of template engines for your view. You
> won't find anything that works out of the box for ecommerce or social
> networks like Satchmo or Pinax on Lua, but then again you won't find
> anything quite like Sputnik on Python, either.
>
> If you lean more Twisted or Tornado then you'll want to look at
> LuaGravity and Lanes. If I was going for radical scalability I'd mix
> these two concurrency models, throw some heavy load testing at it and
> see what happens to the C10K barrier. If you've ever wished that the
> HTTP stack on Twisted didn't make those loud vacuum noises then you'll
> want to take a look at Reactive Server Pages.
>
> Lua may not have the obvious library support that Python does, but the
> basics are there and the APIs tend to be pretty stable. Most of the
> community software in Lua is MIT/X, which gives you more options with
> your final product than GPL or LGPL licensed code. It's not trite,
> either, to say that you can always bind a C library for a given task,
> so (when that comes up) don't look at that idea through a lens of
> what's involved generating Python bindings.
>
> Chris
> --
> Yippee-ki-yay, coffee maker.
>
>