Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/27/06, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Unthreaded: in a clear field, Chad, what *would* you have implemented MediaWiki in? And why?
Much of recent development and administration has focused on caching, clustering, failover, load balancing, and so on. It seems to me that the decision to use a ready-made application server like JBoss, Resin or Zope (or WebSphere if you want proprietary) or a different database server would make a greater difference for long term deployment of a very large scale wiki farm like Wikimedia than the choice of a particular programming language (though of course one may imply the other).
One downside to the application-server approach is that, unless carefully written so use of the application server was optional, it would significantly complicate the reuse potential of MediaWiki by smaller-scale operations. Now making MediaWiki maximally reusable open-source software is a secondary goal to using it ourselves, but insofar as it's the only reliable renderer of our content, it's not entirely irrelevant.
The current setup has the nice benefit that it is almost ludicrously easy to configure: The only prerequisites are the very standard MySQL and PHP, and then you just untar the source files and run config.php.
-Mark