This is very good news for Lua as a web development language. The avaialability of a high-quality deployment option for web applications will remove one of the primary obstacles to acceptance of Lua for web development. Lua’s small size could make it an appealing environment for use on small, cheap VPS systems from providers such as Dreamhost. Its performance should make it attractive for larger systems too.
With any luck I'll be able to backport it to 2.2 as well, once it is stable, itself. It would probably be backported as an external module though, as it was when we called it mod_wombat.
If you read further into that mailing list thread, you see that the decision was to use 'mod_lua'. The previous user of that name has abdicated the throne, so to speak.
This could be huge...I mean, really huge, like so huge it puts some far-fetched project like: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ into a codeable context. If this module gets the care and tenderness it deserves I think it's safe to assume that it will forever change how we use HTTP and what we use it for. I mean think about it, given the advent of JavaScript on the front-end plus something like Lua on the back-end. . .you might as well say good-night to our current client-server model for the web as we know it. This is so big that calling it something like Web3.0 is a misnomer, something this big could render our operating-systems into browsers, our desktops into plugins/extensions, and our applications into remote-services...ok ok, maybe those last few somethings were a bit of a stretch, but it's exciting to see someone as big as Apache introduce a scrpiting module that has been responsible for something as successful as the gaming industry that this could be that back-end interface that JavaScript has been so patiently waiting waiting for ever since it almost miscarried out of the womb of Netscape. Plus, it's reassuring to know that C isn't going out of style any time soon. :P
Whoa. I'm not sure where your enthusiasm is coming from. It's nice to have simple support for another language in Apache, but I don't see how this changes much in the big picture.
Lua may be nice (so I've heard, I've never actually used it) but it's not orders of magnitude better than Python, Ruby, or even PHP. You can't run Lua in the vast majority of browsers. If you want a unified language on server and client, your best bet is probably JavaScript.
<shamelessplug>I'm currently working on making the state of server side JavaScript a little better with Jack, which is like Rack/WSGI for JavaScript: http://jackjs.org </shamelessplug>
I have a feeling that if Lua catches on, though, that it will become the same cut-n-paste quagmire that PHP did. If you are only using something because it is already installed, you are not going to bother with libraries. That makes me sad.
Well, any language that becomes popular is going to have its share of crappy code being written. I'd much rather see newbie programmers get their start with a cleaner language like Lua than PHP, maybe it might help them learn better from the beginning.
Orbit is more like Camping or web.py than Rails, though. But I tried to make its deployment (along with the rest of Kepler) as easy as PHP's as possible. :-) Having a Lua embedded on Apache by default should make fast deployment very easy, too (the easiest way to deploy on Apache right now is CGI, with FastCGI being a little more work).
There is, the Kepler folks came up with it, they call it WSAPI.
My main use for mod_lua, right now, is actually not content handlers (regular apps), but things like auth modules, ripping out mod_rewrite, etc. A large news company in atlanta used it for mobile browser sniffing and redirects at the first point in apache's handler chain (the quick_handler), as well.
Lua has the nice trait of being tiny, fast, and playing correctly with all the various threading/process models apache supports. Ruby and Python don't.
Mod_wombat (now mod_lua) came into being out of frustration trying to embed ruby, and then python, in apache with the worker or event mpms (multi-threaded).
