This is awesome. Congratulations to Gabriel and the rest of the team. I'll surely hope this will provide a stable platform for getting Wikimedia content on even more platforms.
-- Hay On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 12:20 PM, Marc Ordinas i Llopis <[email protected]> wrote: > Congratulations! After all the hard work that has gone into this, it's > great to see it up and running. Besides the improvements it will allow in > existing projects, I can't wait to see the new things it will enable. > > -- Marc > > On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 11:23 PM, Gabriel Wicke <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> Hello all, >> >> I am happy to announce the beta release of the Wikimedia REST Content API >> at >> >> https://rest.wikimedia.org/ >> >> Each domain has its own API documentation, which is auto-generated from >> Swagger API specs. For example, here is the link for the English Wikipedia: >> >> https://rest.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/v1/?doc >> >> At present, this API provides convenient and low-latency access to article >> HTML, page metadata and content conversions between HTML and wikitext. >> After extensive testing we are confident that these endpoints are ready for >> production use, but have marked them as 'unstable' until we have also >> validated this with production users. You can start writing applications >> that depend on it now, if you aren't afraid of possible minor changes >> before transitioning to 'stable' status. For the definition of the terms >> ‘stable’ and ‘unstable’ see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_versioning >> . >> >> While general and not specific to VisualEditor, the selection of endpoints >> reflects this release's focus on speeding up VisualEditor. By storing >> private Parsoid round-trip information separately, we were able to reduce >> the HTML size by about 40%. This in turn reduces network transfer and >> processing times, which will make loading and saving with VisualEditor >> faster. We are also switching from a cache to actual storage, which will >> eliminate slow VisualEditor loads caused by cache misses. Other users of >> Parsoid HTML like Flow, HTML dumps, the OCG PDF renderer or Content >> translation will benefit similarly. >> >> But, we are not done yet. In the medium term, we plan to further reduce >> the HTML size by separating out all read-write metadata. This should allow >> us to use Parsoid HTML with its semantic markup >> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/MediaWiki_DOM_spec> directly for >> both views and editing without increasing the HTML size over the current >> output. Combined with performance work in VisualEditor, this has the >> potential to make switching to visual editing instantaneous and free of any >> scrolling. >> >> We are also investigating a sub-page-level edit API for >> micro-contributions and very fast VisualEditor saves. HTML saves don't >> necessarily have to wait for the page to re-render from wikitext, which >> means that we can potentially make them faster than wikitext saves. For >> this to work we'll need to minimize network transfer and processing time on >> both client and server. >> >> More generally, this API is intended to be the beginning of a >> multi-purpose content API. Its implementation (RESTBase >> <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/RESTBase>) is driven by a declarative >> Swagger API specification, which helps to make it straightforward to extend >> the API with new entry points. The same API spec is also used to >> auto-generate the aforementioned sandbox environment, complete with handy >> "try it" buttons. So, please give it a try and let us know what you think! >> >> This API is currently unmetered; we recommend that users not perform more >> than 200 requests per second and may implement limitations if necessary. >> >> I also want to use this opportunity to thank all contributors who made >> this possible: >> >> - Marko Obrovac, Eric Evans, James Douglas and Hardik Juneja on the >> Services team worked hard to build RESTBase, and to make it as extensible >> and clean as it is now. >> >> - Filippo Giunchedi, Alex Kosiaris, Andrew Otto, Faidon Liambotis, Rob >> Halsell and Mark Bergsma helped to procure and set up the Cassandra storage >> cluster backing this API. >> >> - The Parsoid team with Subbu Sastry, Arlo Breault, C. Scott Ananian and >> Marc Ordinas i Llopis is solving the extremely difficult task of converting >> between wikitext and HTML, and built a new API that lets us retrieve and >> pass in metadata separately. >> >> - On the MediaWiki core team, Brad Jorsch quickly created a minimal >> authorization API that will let us support private wikis, and Aaron Schulz, >> Alex Monk and Ori Livneh built and extended the VirtualRestService that >> lets VisualEditor and MediaWiki in general easily access external services. >> >> We welcome your feedback here: >> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:RESTBase - and in Phabricator >> <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/create/?projects=RESTBase&title=Feedback:> >> . >> >> Sincerely -- >> >> Gabriel Wicke >> >> Principal Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Engineering mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/engineering >> >> > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Mediawiki-api mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api
