README

Mercury
... because Sinatra is not the only one performing on the stage.
================================================================================

-- Introduction ----------------------------------------------------------------

Mercury aims to be a Sinatra-like web framework (or DSL, if you like) for 
creating web applications in Lua, quickly and painlessly.

  require 'mercury'
  
  module('hello', package.seeall, mercury.application)
  
  get('/', function() 
    return "Hello world!"
  end)

Mercury is currently in its very early stages of development, it started like 
an hack and right now it still is nothing more than that. Having said that, I 
thought that things might get interesting and so I decided to release the 
actual source code and start working on it to get it properly done.

-- About the name --------------------------------------------------------------

"Mercury" because:
 * like Sinatra, he is a legend of the music history. That is, Freddie Mercury.
 * most of the cool web projects coded in Lua have astronomical references: 
    - the Kepler Project (web development platform)
    - Orbit (MVC framework)
    - Cosmo (templating system)
    - Sputnik (wiki engine)
 * it is the smallest planet in our solar system and the nearest to the Sun... 
 * ... and Mercury is the smallest web framework and the nearest to the "core".

-- How to execute the examples -------------------------------------------------

If you have installed Mercury using LuaRocks you should have the 'mercury' 
executable file available in your PATH, you just need to enter in the samples 
directory and launch one of the applications like this:

    mercury greetings

If, instead, you have simply cloned the repository, you can launch one of the 
example applications from the root directory of the project like this:

    LUA_PATH="samples/?.lua;;" ./bin/mercury greetings

-- Contributors ----------------------------------------------------------------

 * Mauricio Henrique Bomfim (http://github.com/mauriciobomfim)
   Support for Lua Pages as a templating engine for Mercury.

 * Norman Clarke (http://github.com/norman)
   Rockspec file for LuaRocks and various fixes.

 * Francois Perrad (http://github.com/fperrad)
   Support for CodeGen as a templating engine for Mercury.

-- Notes -----------------------------------------------------------------------

Want to help or contribute? Drop me a mail to suppakilla{at}gmail.com