Building Flexible and Extensible Web Applications

The World Wide Web is in constant renovation, with new technologies emerging every day. Most of these technologies are still incipient, and there are few de facto standards for this \new Web". There is a need for tools that can run with current standard support, but which are exible and extensible enough to be eventually ported to new APIs and to incorporate new technologies. On the other hand, many Web developers cannot keep pace with the fast track of Web technologies. Therefore, it is important for new tools to be simple enough to be mastered quickly by the average programmer. This paper presents CGILua, a Web development tool that matches these requirements. The paper also discusses why this tool is being adopted in many commercial and academic projects, focusing on issues such as exibility, extensibility, simplicity, and portability.