Rob Lanphier <robla <at> wikimedia.org> writes:
Tim Starling <tstarling <at> wikimedia.org> wrote:
We still want to do something about parser performance in the first half of 2012, so we're going to bring forward our other performance project, i.e. server-side scripting embedded in wikitext. That's a project which is still at an early stage of planning. We will need to define its scope, and to bite the bullet and make some tough design choices (such as Lua versus JavaScript), if it's going to progress from pipe dream to reality.
Let's resolve to have all of the big pieces nailed down by January 31. In particular, it should be possible to make the WikiScript vs Lua vs Javascript decision well before that time.
There already seems to be a credible starting point for Lua and WikiScript, but not yet one for Javascript or any other language. Is there anyone willing to put together a Javascript proof-of-concept?
Rob
Is someone picking up this gauntlet? :)
I am interested in contributing some time to this because I'm a relatively new mediawiki developer and at first glance, templates are just... repellant. I already spent an afternoon setting up the Lua extension on my dev wiki and writing an Infobox template. If you look at some of the templates that our users at Wikia build ( a good example is this 217K monster Infobox at Fallout wiki)
http://fallout.wikia.com/index.php?title=Template:Infobox&action=raw
It's clear that this is a LOT of work to just output a <TABLE>. However, writing raw Lua code to output HTML is not much fun without a good template library. Here is a simple example:
http://owen.wikia-dev.com/wiki/InfoboxLua?action=raw
It is littered with embedded HTML and string.format statements. Ugh. I'm going to look at something simple like Moustache (which has both JS and Lua implementations already) as a proof of concept. Does anybody have a better suggestion? I think Lua (or JS) by itself is not enough, there has to be a nice library of utility functions. Has anyone thought about what that will really look like?
I do have some spare time over the holiday and I can take a shot at hacking together a node.js equivalent of the Lua extension. Is that really the highest priority though? I'm willing to do it, but it seems like there are also a lot of other questions to be answered besides just the languagechoice.
Owen@wikia