The Sailor web framework
- Building a Lua-based MVC Framework
This is an introductory text about Sailor and how it all started!
I’m a student at PUC-Rio, home of Lua programming language. For some reason, Lua has more recognition abroad, being used in very known softwares such as World of Warcraft, Angry Birds and MediaWiki, and is not a popular thing here. How is it possible that in the the very same university where researchers designed a programming language people don’t try to use it whenever possible? Maybe I’m being stubborn, but I firmly believe we should pay more attention to home-grown stuff, specially when it’s well designed open source. Everyone benefits from widening the use of Lua. If it’s used more often, improvements will be encouraged, the community will grow, it will be easier to find examples and support, PUC-Rio will have more recognition, its researchers will have more recognition, its students will have more recognition. And that includes me.
Looking from another angle, here I am, at Lua's nest. I studied Programming Language Semantics with Roberto Ierusalimschy himself, Formal Languages with Hisham Muhammad and Basic Software with Ana Lúcia de Moura. Let's say I'm in the right place, in the right time and can get in contact with the right people so easily. It's an opportunity to see what's going on on first hand and I'd be so foolish if I didn't learn something about it before I graduate or leave Rio de Janeiro.
So I decided to go on an adventure and develop something real using Lua. My learning curve goes much faster this way. Also, most of my experience as a programmer resides in web development. To make my learning process even easier, why not unite both? And that's how Sailor started. My adventure turned into a lunatic kamikaze thing as I'm seeing Lua for the first time AND building a fully functional MVC web framework at the same time, but it's hella fun!
Yay!
Sailor is completely free to use and open source. If you want to check it out, use it or collaborate, here's the website and the github's repo:
https://github.com/Etiene/sailor
EDIT #
Sailor is no longer in active development…