Everything started with a post, benchmarking cherrypy agains other similar web servers . Nothing special, we can see how good Mongrel is ;) What catched my attention was the lines about LuaWeb2:

[Mongrel]
...
Requests per second:    386.31 [#/sec] (mean)

[LuaWeb]
...
Requests per second:    927.04 [#/sec] (mean)

What the hack… In general I like Lua , because of the small size, easy to extend and embed, easy to learn. I made several simple application before, but never gone too deep in my Lua experiments. So what I found now was pretty amazing and surprized me. For me Lua seems pretty much ready for web 2.0 applications development :

• LuaForge—community portal, very active – a lot of interesting applications
• Kepler—Web development platform, runs under Windows, Linux, OSX and a number of other operating systems, allows the use of SQL, LDAP, XML, SOAP and other standards! LuaFilesystem, LuaSQL, LuaLDAP, CGILua…And see this: LuaJava—allow scripts written in Lua to manipulate components developed in Java, LuaJava also allows Java to implement an interface using Lua! Whaaaau…
• CGILua currently supports CGI, FastCGI, mod_lua (for Apache), ISAPI (for Microsoft IIS), Servlets (for Tomcat), LunaticPython (for Zope) , Xavante (a Lua Web server that supports CGILua natively) as Launchers
• Xavante—Lua HTTP 1.1 Web server that uses a modular architecture based on handlers

A little more googling give me also this:

• SVN Repository with Lua resources

-- from DB/TestModel.lua
DBModel:load( function() 
        Is( Book ) 
        Has( title ) 
        Has( price ) 
        HasOne( publisher ) 
        HasMany( authors ) 
end )

Looks familiar a ;)

It’s just a question of time somebody to combine this with some of the so many existing Ajax frameworks.