* * * * *
                                        
   I'll only upgrade software if there's a compelling reason to, and for me,
                mod_lua is a compelling reason to upgrade Apache
                                        
Nah, it's not quite time to close up shop [1] … (so much for my April Fool's
joke this year—most people missed the style changes I did for several years
running, but a) most people read the entries here via the newsfeed so the
visual change in layout was always lost on them, and b) I never did find that
round toit I needed to change the style—anyway, I digess).

I've been looking a bit deeper into Drupal [2] these past few days (seeing
how I'm scheduled to give a repeat of my talk [3] at the new West Palm Beach
Drupal users group [4] this month—I'm giving a lot of presentations this year
it seems) and trying to get into the whole PHP framework and well … as a
diversion, I thought it might be interesting to see what type of web-based
framework one could do in Lua [5], and why not attempt it using mod_lua [6]?

Well, the fact that I linked to the svn [7] respository should say something
about the stability of mod_lua—it ain't. It's only currently available for
the latest development version [8] of Apache [9], there's no documentation
(except for the source code) and a smattering of example code [10] to guide
the intrepid. It's also not terribly reassuring that it hasn't been worked on
for a few months.

That didn't stop me from trying it though.

I spent a few hours debugging the module [11], enough for it to pass the few
tests available and hopefully, the Apache team will accept the patch (a call
to memset() to initialize a structure to a known value before use).

Now that it doesn't crash, it does appear to be quite nice, allowing the same
access that any Apache module in C would have, and it looks like one could
effectively replace a few of the murkier modules (like mod_rewrite [12]) with
more straightforward Lua implementation. My initial thoughts are to
reimplement mod_litbook [13] (which currently only works for Apache 1.3x)
using mod_lua as a test case (and heck—maybe even upgrade the existing
mod_litbook to Apache 2.x so I won't have to keep running an Apache 1.3
instance [14] just for one portion of my website).

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2010/04/01.1
[2] http://drupal.org/
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2010/02/20.3
[4] http://groups.drupal.org/node/55998
[5] http://www.lua.org/
[6] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/lua/
[7] http://subversion.tigris.org/
[8] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/
[9] http://httpd.apache.org/
[10] http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/httpd/httpd/trunk/modules/lua/test/
[11] https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=49044
[12] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_rewrite.html
[13] https://github.com/spc476/mod_litbook
[14] http://literature.conman.org/bible/

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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