Rob Lanphier <robla <at> wikimedia.org> writes:
Tim Starling <tstarling <at> wikimedia.org> wrote:
We still want to do something about parser
performance in the first
half of 2012, so we're going to bring forward our other performance
project, i.e. server-side scripting embedded in wikitext. That's a
project which is still at an early stage of planning. We will need to
define its scope, and to bite the bullet and make some tough design
choices (such as Lua versus JavaScript), if it's going to progress
from pipe dream to reality.
Let's resolve to have all of the big pieces nailed down by January 31.
In particular, it should be possible to make the WikiScript vs Lua vs
Javascript decision well before that time.
There already seems to be a credible starting point for Lua and
WikiScript, but not yet one for Javascript or any other language. Is
there anyone willing to put together a Javascript proof-of-concept?
Rob
Is someone picking up this gauntlet? :)
I am interested in contributing some time to this because I'm a relatively
new mediawiki developer and at first glance, templates are just... repellant.
I already spent an afternoon setting up the Lua extension on my dev wiki
and writing an Infobox template. If you look at some of the templates
that our users at Wikia build ( a good example is this 217K monster
Infobox at Fallout wiki)
http://fallout.wikia.com/index.php?title=Template:Infobox&action=raw
It's clear that this is a LOT of work to just output a <TABLE>. However,
writing raw Lua code to output HTML is not much fun without a good
template library. Here is a simple example:
http://owen.wikia-dev.com/wiki/InfoboxLua?action=raw
It is littered with embedded HTML and string.format statements. Ugh.
I'm going to look at something simple like Moustache (which has both
JS and Lua implementations already) as a proof of concept. Does
anybody have a better suggestion? I think Lua (or JS) by itself is not
enough, there has to be a nice library of utility functions. Has anyone
thought about what that will really look like?
I do have some spare time over the holiday and I can take a shot at
hacking together a node.js equivalent of the Lua extension. Is that
really the highest priority though? I'm willing to do it, but it seems
like there are also a lot of other questions to be answered besides
just the languagechoice.
Owen@wikia