There will be (actually, there is already) a web API offering the kind of data required, and for client wikis not running on WMF infrastructure this will eventually be the way to access the data.
For WMF clients, like the Wikipedias, our decision was not to use HTTP web requests, but to internally get the data directly from the respective DB. This was deemed the deciding factor wrt performance: internal DB queries vs HTTP requests. The cost of serializing to and from JSON was not deemed relevant, as you argue for. This sums up my understanding of the situation, I might easily be wrong. Cheers, Denny 2013/2/5 Gabriel Wicke <gwi...@wikimedia.org> > On 02/05/2013 02:35 AM, Jens Ohlig wrote: > >> I'm wondering if some of the specialized functionality can be avoided by > >> fetching JSON data from wikibase / wikidata through a web API. This > >> would be more versatile, and could be used by alternative templating > >> systems. > > > > This was actually my first idea! However, since the client (i.e. > > Wikipedia) currently must have access to the database at the repo (i.e. > > Wikidata) anyway, this would result in a huge performance loss without > > any obvious gain. > > Jens, > > I am not so sure about the potential performance loss. I am guessing > that you fear the overheads of JSON serialization, which tends to be > relatively low with current libraries. Moving or accessing PHP objects > to/from Lua involves some overheads too, which is avoided when directly > decoding in Lua. > > Apart from making the data generally available, using a web API means > that the execution can be parallelized / distributed and potentially > cached. It also tends to lead to narrow interfaces with explicit > handling of state. Is direct DB access just needed because an API is > missing, or are there technical issues that are hard to handle in a web > API? > > Adding specialized Wikidata methods to Lua has a cost for users and > developers. Users probably need to learn larger and less general APIs. > Developers need to continue to support these methods once the content is > there, which can be difficult if the specialized methods don't cleanly > map to a future web API. > > Gabriel > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- Project director Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. | Obentrautstr. 72 | 10963 Berlin Tel. +49-30-219 158 26-0 | http://wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e.V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
