Orbiter

I have finally made new releases of WSAPI, which the changes that I alluded to in the last post, plus a few other changes and bug fixes. This is the changelog:

• Fixed memory leak with reload option for persistent loaders that was introduced by the new Lua state life cycle management
• Added raw HTTP responses to wsapi.common; useful when rolling your own HTTP server/proxy
• Fixed segmentation fault when non-string is provided to lfcgi.getenv() (thanks to mkottman@github)
• Added CGILua bootstrap to wsapi.sapi, so CGILua can run without a kepler_init module present
• Added an extra_vars paremeter to wsapi.xavante.makeHandler and wsapi.xavante.makeGenericHandler, to let you pass extra variables in the WSAPI environment
• Added overwrite option to wsapi.request that tells the parameter parser to overwrite repeated parameters instead of collecting them in a list
• Added a parameter isolated to the persistent generic loaders that controls whether you isolate each script in a Lua state or not
• Added parameters to the persistent generic loaders that let the user control the life cycle of Lua states: period sets how long WSAPI should wait between collecting stale states, and ttl sets the period after which a state becomes stale
• Fixed bug in wsapi.ringer that didn’t let you use wsapi.input:read inside the response iterator
• Parameter vars for the WSAPI generic loaders that which variables WSAPI should check to get the physical path of the script, and in which order. Defaults to trying SCRIPT_FILENAME first and PATH_TRANSLATED second

I have been doing a lot of web infrastructure work for Lua these past months, and pushing this WSAPI release lets me focus on mk and Orbit. There are still some uncommited changes to WSAPI in the mk branch, and this branch is where the development for WSAPI 1.4 is happening.

I hope I can find time to talk about what mk is and about my plans for Orbit 3 soon. Most of what Orbit 2 is has migrated to mk, and with Orbit 3 I want to raise Orbit’s level of abstraction.

Download either the WSAPI installer or the offline installer if you want to install without a net connection. Or download and install LuaRocks and luarocks install either wsapi, wsapi-fcgi or wsapi-xavante, depending on which way you want to launch WSAPI (CGI, FastCGI or Xavante).