On 02/05/2013 10:53 AM, Brad Jorsch wrote:
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
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.
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.
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.
Gabriel