On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Gabriel Wicke <gwicke(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
It would also
mean that MediaWiki would be making uncontrolled API
calls *during the page parse*.
To me it is not clear why a Wikidata web API would be less controlled
than a Wikidata Lua API with direct access to the DB.
Oh. Earlier you were talking about general API access.
That would
probably not work out too
well; I know on my local test wiki it's a pain just having to wait for
the ForeignAPIRepo calls for images.
Slow operations will be slow, no matter how you call them. With a web
API you at least get to parallelize and distribute the execution, so
that you don't have to wait for a sequence of slow operations.
OTOH, with an API in Lua/PHP that accesses the database directly you
don't have to worry about establishing a TCP connection, sending
headers, waiting for a response, etc.
--
Brad Jorsch
Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation