On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 07:18:31PM +0100, Erik Moeller wrote:
This is interesting. Based on my own experience, I can tell you that cross-browser compatibility is going to be a PITA. For Wikidata and Ultimate Wiktionary, I'm considering using this library:
http://ianbicking.org/examples/repeat_form/form.html
It's built on top of Mochikit, a fairly powerful JavaScript library.
When dealing with complex forms on top of a relational database (which is essentially what Wikidata is going to be, plus versioning and other wiki-ness), safe failover is really hard to achieve. Essentially, one has to accept that applications of a certain complexity, especially dealing with data entry, require certain capabilities on the client end.
Has Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.com) been considered for Wikidata? (from looking trough the Meta discussion page it seems this is not the case)
I've been reading the "Agile Web Development with Rails" book, and trying some tiny web apps myself, and it really is a very nice and much more abstract way of writing web applications (which most of the time leads to more productivity).
The real challenge here would be the integration of the existing PHP function/state framework with something written in Ruby (http://www.rubyist.net/~slagell/ruby/index.html).
Ruby to Mediawiki bindings, single-login user session handling, combined HTML rendering, and more would be needed, but I think in the end the future benefits of this increased productivity and the future Rails plugin extensions could really be very interesting. Unfortunately it involves a lot of complicated work, thats for sure.
regards,
Jama Poulsen http://wikicompany.org http://debianlinux.net