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 <gwi...@wikimedia.org> 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 > engineer...@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/engineering > > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
