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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?

derobert
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  • The Orbit (http://orbit.luaforge.net/) framework looks fairly complete. –  Jul 22 '09 at 05:05
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    Because you don't know Lua and you're trying to get your website to run on a 6502 with 1K of memory. Alternatively, could you please clarify? Are you maybe looking for some issues that you might run in to? Other people's experience with Lua web development? Random gotchas? Etc. – derobert Jul 22 '09 at 05:12
  • >>"Are you maybe looking for some issues that you might run in to? Other people's experience with Lua web development? Random gotchas?" Yes –  Jul 22 '09 at 05:33
  • @TimH: Ok, I have edited your question to reflect that... Feel free to change or revert if you don't like my edit. – derobert Jul 22 '09 at 05:44

5 Answers5

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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.

RBerteig
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    This answer is outdated. – develCuy Jul 28 '14 at 01:51
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    The answer was current when written, reflected my personal experience, and my understanding of then best practice within the Lua community. All answers have to be read in context with the question, and with the age of the question. Downvoting the answer today is petty at best, and certainly unproductive. – RBerteig Jul 28 '14 at 23:38
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    Comment about outdated answer was not likely intended as a slight against the answerer, but instead a helpful warning to figure visitors. Nothing wrong with downvoting in a situation like this. As answerer you're also welcome to update the answer or write a new one that is more up to date, if you like, but there's no pressure to do so. – thomasrutter Mar 20 '16 at 10:31
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take a look at http://openresty.com/ (nginx and lua/luajit, async)

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

akway
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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?

ken
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    Lua, not LUA. See this page: http://www.lua.org/about.html#name – lhf Jul 24 '09 at 21:51
  • I must have missed the original notification, but I've now corrected the mistake. Thanks for bringing it up. I can't believe I used it incorrectly, I distinctly remember reading about Lua and it's history while I was learning it. – ken May 23 '14 at 15:16
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Another MVC framework based on Lua is also Luci.

Mitar
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