Lua is a very useful language for many things.  Extending core base code with modules and add-ons have made it very useful in game development but since Lua is table-based it can also be easily applied to web development. Well that time has come, See the Kepler Project for a nice collection of modules that make a good start for web development with Lua.

Kepler is an open source platform that brings the power of Lua to web development. There are a number of great Web development platforms out there but none balances portability, size, power and extensibility quite like Kepler does:

• Being extremely portable and light means that it can be installed in very constrained devices as much as in providers that limit the amount of RAM and processing time for your scripts.
• If you ever heard of the customization features of games such as World of Warcraft, think about all that power applied to web scripting.
• Being extensible means both that we can extend the platform by adding new modules and that the users of the applications that you build can extend those applications using Lua.

Kepler was created by Fábrica Digital and PUC-Rio and is continuously being improved by a core team of commiters (see Dev Team) and lots of contributors (see Credits).

Kepler is free software and uses the MIT license model: it can be used for both academic and commercial purposes at absolutely no cost. See the Kepler License for more details.

Kepler is a platform that uses LuaRocks to offer Modules such as:

• Page based and MVC XHTML generation (WSAPI, CGILua and Orbit)
• SQL and XML processing (LuaSQL and LuaExpat)
• Hash (MD5) and a pair crypt/decrypt
• Zip files reading (LuaZip)

The Lua community is constantly contributing with more modules that can be used with the Kepler Architecture. Most of those modules are catalogued on LuaForge and new ones keep coming.

Unix installation

Please check UNIX Installation for a detailed view of how to install Kepler on Unix machines (including OSX).

Windows installation

Installing Kepler on Windows does not require any C compiler and should work on any Windows machine with internet access.

1. Download LuaRocks and install it using install /SCRIPTS c:\luarocks\0.5.2
2. Add the LuaRocks scripts dir to your system path (the same directory used in the /SCRIPTS parameter above)
3. Install Kepler and Xavante using luarocks install kepler-xavante
4. Configure everything using setup-kepler and following the instructions
5. Use xavante to run Xavante as a tray bar application, or use ‘xavante_start’ to run Xavante from the command prompt. Another option is to run Kepler using CGI

Once Kepler is running, you might want to look at those pages:

• Hello World will tell you how to write a simple application
• Using a Database will tell you how to use some of the popular databases with Kepler.
• Configuring Web Servers will tell you how to use Kepler with some specific web servers.

The Kepler 1.1 Unix installer can be downloaded from its downloads page. Check the Installation page for more details and for the Windows installation instructions (using LuaRocks).

If you need the binaries for specifics Modules you can also get them from LuaForge, on the module respective project page.

Finally rest for all that boilerplate in Java.  At each turn of lots of Java frameworks you are bombarded with layers.  I felt this long ago and see it in the developers eyes that work with Java.  Java can be easy, it can be RESTful and it will make you look sharp.

Lightweight REST framework for Java

Do you want to embrace the architecture of the Web and benefit from its simplicity and scalability? Leverage our innovative REST engine and start blending your Web Sites and Web Services into uniform Web Applications!

Java is making things more lightweight now with lots of emerging kits that compete with other web ready platforms like Python, Ruby, .NET, PHP etc. After this many years things get bloated and need to be simplified.  I think this will start winning people over in this direction.

XML is railed against plenty these days for being too verbose and leads to massive config invasions in your codez. But it deserves due respect for what it did.

What did it do you say?

Well, there was a time when data services rarely existed, connecting to trading partners or business partners was almost impossible. Connecting with partners directly to their RDBMS which is poor coupling and is not as message based as services.

Before XML was accepted it was a pipe-delimited, tab delimited, column delimited, ini file, proprietary binary serialization, locked down, non sharing, no service type world. It was the dark ages of data sharing. Hate on XML all you want, XML opened the doors.

Then comes XML, the executives and CTO magazines flooded with the term XML and large budgets signed on the word alone. But was it all hype or did it do something amazing? XML Amazing you say? With XML it was so simple it gave people no excuse not to open up information. A flawless victory on data nazi attitude. Is it the best, no, but it did what was necessary. We would not have the service based systems we have now of even JSON or other more micro formats at all if it weren’t for XML. Both HTML and XHTML and XML are all responsible (javascript as well and MIME) for delivering the simplistic base platform which all programmers can write to to instantly make their apps standard, the web and services that live on them.

After XML… Yes, XML did the amazing… It freed data into services. The web was also instrumental in this effort itself but when systems started working so closely together the exchange and mapping of data quickly became troublesome. Before web services emerged, client/server, remoting, RPC or other more closely coupled communication connections ruled the day. XML with web services helped to push the service model in addition to other technologies such as SOAP bloated but XMLRPC, REST, JSON, have emerged in stronger force or late because they are better iterations and less enterprise-y and simpler and more compact but I still believe that XML was in large part a tool that made data so simple to share that the capabilities and costs came down when people wanted to expose this data.

XML deserves to be a baseplane technology and is used where appropriate in baseplane tools and toolkits.

XML is recently 10 years old, seems like the average for standards to truly take hold and influence. Same with CSS, XHTML, the DHTML that later became AJAX and javascript kits of today. They are all stepping platforms.