Using Lua for web development?

Question

What issues or gotchas will I run into if I develop web applications in Lua; is there anything I should be aware of before starting?

Any experience with developing Lua web applications?

Answer 1

Go ahead and give it a shot! Lua is a very nice language.

Answer 2

Interesting concept. I think one of the things you need to consider is which webserver do you plan to use? I think the webserver support for LUA would be flaky at best, no offense to anyone involved but its just not a common web platform.

With that said, however, the LUA Libraries And Bindings lists quite a few components that you could seemingly leverage for your efforts. I looked the list over and all things common to the web are there: databases, regex, network, zip, crypto, xml, images, etc. There's even a couple of web frameworks, so perhaps this is less rare than I thought?

Answer 3

The web application framework based on Lua that gets a lot of discussion in the Lua community is the Kepler project. The Kepler team provides integration with web servers (especially Apache), a web server of their own, useful modules, and a working MVC application framework called Orbit.

Several other projects work with or on top of Kepler's foundation. A prominent one that demonstrates that Kepler can be used for real work is Sputnik, a very flexible and extensible CMS that functions as a Wiki out of the box but which can be extended to do many other things.

Speaking from personal experience, I built a control interface for an embedded system using Kepler's Lua Pages to render and process the forms and reports without much hassle as only my second or third real Lua project. That system is still in use and I would do it again.