Ask HN: Anyone used Lua Kepler? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Anyone used Lua Kepler?

9 pointsBjornW5 comments

I've been looking at Lua for some time now, mostly because it's supposedly very lean and can be used with quite low tech hardware requirements. Recently I heard about Kepler (http://www.keplerproject.org/) - a Lua web framework - and I'm curious about the experiences people have using this. So if you are or have used Kepler could you tell me about your experience. Questions that come to mind are: What webserver would be a good fit? Are there any real-world examples (the ones on Kepler.org seem to be pretty old)? Any benchmarks (only if it's more than 'hello World' please) and what are the pro's and cons aka when would you recommend using it?

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A more recent commercial site that is using Kepler (via the Sputnik wiki/cms) is the site for the "World of Warcraft Programming" book, created by the book's author. I have updated http://www.keplerproject.org/en/Uses (the current Kepler homepage itself uses Sputnik, too) to reflect that, and link to the Sputnik sightings page.

The big con is that the included batteries have very low wattage-hour. :-) A lot of things that you can take for granted on the big Ruby/Python frameworks you will have to build yourself.

The upside is that once you get the ball rolling it's very easy to deploy, and will run without issues on the most stingy shared hosting (Lua is very CGI-friendly). It can run on any server that supports CGI or FastCGI, and also includes a Lua webserver (single-threaded only at the time, though).

Thanks. Could you elaborate why you used Kepler and Lua? Was this specifically due to the usage of Lua in WoW addon programming?

I am not one of the book/site's authors, but one of the Kepler commiters :-), but this is what they say at the site's about page:

"This website is powered entirely by Lua, using Sputnik, an extensible wiki package. When the authors and contributers were compiling the electronic API reference, Lua tables were chosen as the data file format, due to it's extreme flexibility and readability. When the time came to produce the online version of the reference, a Lua-based solution was obviously attractive."

As for the wiki's author, he was studying software projects based on Brazil as part of his PhD at UC Berkeley School of Information and decided to stick around and participate.

Probably not what you want to hear, but on a previous project (before I knew about LuaRocks) to save some time I used kepler-1.1beta2 as part of my base OSX and linux Lua stack because the Kepler folks went to the trouble of creating an autotools bundle with several extensions I wanted. I didn't actually use Kepler itself but their build logic worked well.

Good to hear the work been put into it Kepler could be used by doing something else as well. Nice to know the system was well designed.

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