Lua Basics
I was asked by a colleague to research the Lua programming language. We are creating interactive television apps and will be using it if/when we develop for Verizon Fios.
Lua is a meta language. It does little but call apps and code from other languages. It is extremely small, fast and extensible, allowing developers a lot of flexibility in creating precise structures to model concepts.
It's only reason for existing is to allow developers to work within systems such as cable boxes, games, other apps. For example, Verizon's Widgets are 'written in Lua'. In actuality, none of the actual functionality in the set top boxes is in Lua (looks like it is EBIF). Lua is used as a layer to access the EBIF functions, routines, etc... So what you get is a Lua toolkit that allows verizon to expose any functionality they want developers to have while not allowing any access to lower level box functions. Since Lua is open source, this also boils down to Verizon allowing developers to work on their ebif platform (which, as we know is closed and hard to get in to) using a widely available and open scripting language.