;) And then there are a few of us who get intimate with a fair percent of the complex and isolated interfaces, enough to scare themselves. T_T Some time ago, I came to realize that I had actually started to grasp an understanding of how the Parser worked. The preprocessor as well. Nearly all my new ParserFunctions use SFH_OBJ_ARGS and some even do scary things with the frames. When someone asks what function to use in a hook or a tag to do something with the parser, I actually understand what part of the parser will best do that for them (Without needing to trudge around the functions and make a bad guess), and even worse... T_T I'm actually rewriting a portion of the parser myself... And I'm starting to make use of parseresque code in my own work.
As for the other, anyone remember my rewrite of the Database class's titleName method. And my suggestion for a doQuery arg (though that was changed into a backend function that works with strings).
Actually, I'm building my own Database library. Heh, now that's the scary portion. I even implemented Brion's idea for a RawSql class ( Trust me ;) it works quite nicely, it even inspired the RawMarkup class inside of my markup abstraction library (similar to the Xml class))
~Daniel Friesen(Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) of: -The Nadir-Point Group (http://nadir-point.com) --It's Wiki-Tools subgroup (http://wiki-tools.com) --The ElectronicMe project (http://electronic-me.org) --Games-G.P.S. (http://ggps.org) -And Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG) --Animepedia (http://anime.wikia.com) --Narutopedia (http://naruto.wikia.com)
Roan Kattouw wrote:
Aryeh Gregor schreef:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 3:24 PM, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
So the obvious followup question is: is there a plan to migrate the front end to *use the API* to talk to the backend (which is the preferred approach to such things anyway)?
One practical issue with this at present is that nobody who does much of anything with core does much of anything with the API. I've barely looked at it at all.
True. Actually, there's a pattern of isolation here. While pretty much all developers are familiar with the 'core' classes (Title, Article, Revision, etc.), very few are familiar with isolated ones such as the parser, the API, the image handling code, the Database abstraction layer (except for select() and similar functions)
As a more philosophical thing, there's no reason for the human UI to call the API. We should have a back-end, and then two interfaces to that: one designed for external robots, and one designed for HTML-viewing humans. Both of the interfaces should use the internal PHP interface to speak to the back-end. The API operates in a format that's suitable for robots to use, not suitable for internal code to use.
Simetrical is right here: the UI and the API call the same functions, and display the results in different ways. That's exactly why there's no sense in migrating the front end to the API (and that's just forgetting about the HTTP overhead involved).
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)