This starts out as a test of a concept to eventually serve the applications from lua. The server is modelled after the standard idea of a normal select based server. Over time it probably won't be converted to more sophisticated concepts such as kpoll, /dev/poll etc, because we just don't need the power. Since the main purpose is to serve Lua applications we will most likely run out of steam before we run out file descriptors. Also please note that it is Linux only at first. Eventually we might wanna be able to hang connections though. Then select will be not sufficient anymore. There shall be no major stumbling blocks for porting it to Mac and even to Windows but the main functionality will be implemented for Linux first.

Parcle is targeted towards Lua 5.1.4 but will try to move to Lua 5.2 as it comes out. There shall be no problems when using LuaJIT instead.

• organize the busy and free connection structs in linked lists for easy flexible access
• instead of working with fixed strings of maximum length, we run on exactly one input buffer so we minimize allocations. Crucial information will be organized by pointers to null terminated strings in the input buffers. That's either a good idea or stupid (because error prone and hard to manage). I wanna have at least a shot at it.
• serve static requests from a fixed length buffer, don't optimize it since it is not the primary use case
• dynamic requests get queued, and then picked of by a thread pool. This does not make a great design for comet style since we are limited by the number of threads in the pool and can't hang connections. Maybe we can do something about that later.
• responses from dynamic requests get buffered in Lua and the C-part of the server gets a pointer to it. This way we can leverage Luas garbage collector.

More information is available from doc/ARCHITECTURE.rst

Check out the future. The main build system is based on clang, the new C frontend to LLVM. Much better error messages make it all worth wile. Lua must be installed. Running "make" invokes clang, assuming you have it installed. Running make with gcc can be done this way: make CC=gcc LD=gcc

• have Lua included in the build, so that users don't have to rely on system-wide installation, which is always a hassle on production environment
• there shall be a command line tool available, allowing to execute Lua functions in the application part as that is very handy for development and debugging
• try to make the communication between the server and the application WSAPI compliant if we can get away without further memory allocation
• utilize Lua_buffer when we come across POST styled requests

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