Is it possible to program for web with Lua?

No doubt about it. Any language can. Even if there was some difficulty in the current ecosystem, and it is good to make it clear that it does not have it, it could be extended with C to give this ability. Of course it does not have everything as fast as PHP or other languages. There are no frameworks as complete as these other languages (which can be an advantage).

See the Lua module for Apache .

Module for Ngnix .

Extension for IIS .

Access by CGI .

Kepler is a mature project for this goal .

Orbit is an framework MVC.

Sailor is another.

There are several others.

Tutorial .

Yes. is not a very mature ecosystem, but there are options of web frameworks in Lua:

• Lapis
• Sailor
• Orbit
• Ophal

Lapis and Sailor look more advanced and robust, more recent and updated.

Yes it is possible.

You can use Orbit , it's an MVC framework for the web.

Yes! List of frameworks by category:

Microframework: Lapis

MVC: Sailor, Orbit

Event-driven: Luvit, TurboLua

CMS, Wikis and others: Ophal, LuaPress, Sputnik, Tir, Lusty, Moonstalk, Webmcp, Mercury, Vanilla, Gimlet Cocktail, Bamboo

In Lua.Space I made a post with reviews of several of these: link

(I would like to have posted the url for each framework here but my stackoverflow reputation leaves no more than 2 for now :()

Response to the primary question:

If Lua is within a string it can be interpreted and transformed into Abstract syntax tree , then the code tree can be transformed into a string that presents a functional code for JavaScript / HTML5. So yes. It is possible.

Tools for converting Lua to interpreted web languages would:

Text (Moon) > Interpretation & tree generation > Web Build

• I believe ...

There is already a parser for Lua that returns the Abstract syntax tree of the text. You can find it on Github or by browsing the search pages through Google.