Credits

Moonstalk's development is supported by The Moon Mill, and is released as open-source under the terms of the Artistic Licence 2.0. (Note that the licence will be changed to GPL once a roadmap has been established.)

Origins

Moonstalk was conceived in mid-2010 during the development of a SaaS e-commerce platform, that had been designed to take advantage of the Lua environment to provide very low-latency database-driven page generation. It's architecture and (potentially dubious!) programming has been undertaken by Jacob Jay (@jacobjay) almost continuously since then, in both India and France.

Contributors

• Deependra Tewari (@deetewari) for The Moon Mill
  First versions of teller/server.lua and sqltable.lua

Adaptations

• translate() function (in lp.lua) from CGILua © 2003 Kepler Project, GPL-compatible licence; adapted as TranslateView() function in scribe/functions.lua.
• geohash-js ©2008 David Troy, MIT Licence; ported to Lua by Christopher Dartnell for duHome.

Dependancies

LuaRocks is recommended for the management and installation of dependancies, and the following modules are shown with their LuaRocks names.

Moonstalk builds its framework upon core libraries developed by the Kepler Project.

• wsapi wsapi-fcgi — Request handling and FastCGI interface in the Scribes with the web server.
• lanes — Threading in the Teller.
• lsqlite3 — Persistence of tables managed by the Teller.
• luasocket luasocket-unix — Support connections between Scribes and the Teller, also includes Base64 functions (in MIME).
• luabins — query serialisation between Scribes and the Teller.
• lua_signal — handles shutdown in the Teller.
• lua-cjson — serialisation of API responses in applications.
• luacrypto — Blowfish encryption for secure tokens, and SHA-256 digests for passwords.
• md5 — Hashing of temporary tokens.