Docs: ZAP Lua SDK · part of the ZAP Protocol

lua-zap

ZAP is an insanely fast data interchange format and capability-based RPC system.

Lua-zap is a pure lua implementation of ZAP based on LuaJIT.

This project is still under early development and is not production-ready.

Synopsis

Suppose you have a ZAP file called example.zap. You can compile this file like this:

$zap compile -olua example.zap

The default output file is example_zap.lua

local example_zap = require "example_zap"

Check out example/AddressBook.zap and example/main.lua for how to use generated lua file.

Installation

To install lua-zap, you need to install ZAP https://zap-proto.io, LuaJIT http://luajit.org/install.html and luarocks http://luarocks.org/en/Download first.

Currently, lua-zap only works with LuaJIT v2.1. You can install LuaJIT v2.1 using the following commands:

$git clone http://luajit.org/git/luajit-2.0.git
$git checkout v2.1
$make && sudo make install
$sudo ln -sf luajit-2.1.0-alpha /usr/local/bin/luajit

Then you can install lua-zap using the following commands:

$sudo luarocks install lua-zap

Let's compile an example file to test whether lua-zap was installed successfully:

$zap compile -olua proto/example.zap proto/enums.zap proto/lua.zap proto/struct.zap

Normally, you should see no errors and a file named "proto/example_zap.lua" is generated.

How to use

Please see the ZAP Lua SDK guide here.

Testing

The test framework (lunitx) is vendored under vendor/, so no extra install is needed to run the unit tests:

$tests/run_tests.sh

Tests 01-sanity and 10-encode-decode need the generated module proto/example_zap.lua. The runner generates it with the zap schema compiler if one is on PATH; otherwise it skips those two and runs the pure-Lua tests (02-util, 03-compile). lua-cjson is optional — it is only used for debug output; install it with luarocks install lua-cjson if you want the schema dumps.

Limitations

• Currently, lua-zap only works with LuaJIT v2.1. This is because lua-zap needs 64 bit integer support and 64bit number bit operations, but only LuaJIT v2.1 provides a decent way to do all these. I'm working on LuaJIT 2.0/ Lua 5.1 / Lua 5.2 support, hopefully you can use lua-zap with your favorite lua soon.
• ZAP RPC is not implemented yet