That's a great question, Jason, and one I will artfully dodge until we
finally decide to build said library ;-). Could be a nice session for next
year's Wikimedia Dev Summit!
Until then, we'll try to build the components for the Wikipedia app with
some amount of generalization in mind. As we the refactoring dust settles
around our current networking stack, we can take a step back and ask for
feedback on what ObjC/Swift developers would want out of such a library
(perhaps an RFC), and do more research into existing MW API libraries. In
particular, I don't know of any official or unofficial JS API wrappers, nor
do I know anything about pywikibot (which might be something to take
inspiration from).
Keep in touch,
Brian
On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 1:38 PM, Jason Ji <jason.y.ji(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Brian,
Nice to hear from you too, and this thread isn't that old, so no worries!
I'm wondering, with this Obj-C/Swift MediaWiki library you're planning in
the future, would it be a "generic" MediaWiki library, or specific to the
Wikimedia wikis? I ask because I remember back at the Hackathon, some of
your queries assumed the existence of certain extensions that the Wikimedia
wikis (or at least Wikipedia) have installed, like Extension:TextExtracts
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TextExtracts>, but not all
MediaWiki instances would have them. A Wikimedia-specific library would
probably have more abilities, but a generic one would allow other
communities using MediaWiki to build iOS apps around their own wikis, which
would be pretty amazing.
Jason
On Tue, Jul 28, 2015 at 12:25 PM, Brian Gerstle <bgerstle(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
Sorry for awkwardly entering/reviving the thread,
guess I wasn't on this
list until now!
Jason, thanks for jumping in! Great to "see" you again :-).
Tong, he's correct that our app is open source and you're free to use
anything there that's useful. Our current networking stack is built on top
of AFNetworking, and you can find the API calls we're making inside the
various "Fetcher" classes (in the Networking folder
<https://github.com/wikimedia/wikipedia-ios/tree/master/Wikipedia/Networking>).
We hope to eventually release a standalone MediaWiki client in
Objective-C, or Swift, or both! However, the dynamic nature of the
MediaWiki API's requests and responses will probably require us to keep the
framework limited to a set of components that allow iOS developers to build
requests and serialize responses into model objects of their choice. We
can provide high-level abstractions for the most common queries (i.e. the
ones we're already using in the app).
We're in the midst of a more UI-focused update at the moment, but
hopefully our next big infrastructure push can result in the release of
such a library, probably on CocoaPods or Carthage.
In the future, you can email mobile-l with any questions related to the
iOS client, and be sure to subscribe there for future updates on the app.
Cheers!
Brian
--
EN Wikipedia user page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Brian.gerstle
IRC: bgerstle
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