New subject: Ongoing hybrid development (was Re: Want to collaborate on writing a feature?)

5 Sep 2006


      Felipe Sanches wrote:
...
After all these 42 messages, is there anybody working on this feature at all?
No. Only Nick Jenkins was actually interested in doing anything, in the role 
of UI designer, and even he didn't go as far as the original post called 
for. Given my failure to convince anyone to work on one of my ideas, I've 
been taking a different approach over the past week or so: supporting 
existing development efforts on the client side.
There is a lot of pure client-side development going on, based on 
modifications to site or user javascript. I'm attempting to improve those 
client-side features by adding customised server-side interfaces for them, 
essentially turning them into hybrid client/server features. Then, if the 
client-side developer will allow me to, I can move the client side component 
into the extensions module as well, thereby creating a hybrid extension 
which will work on all MediaWiki wikis with minimal installation effort.
The extensions which I am working on are:
* ProofreadPage. This is an extension to support transcription of scanned 
images on Wikisource. The client-side developer is ThomasV. It is mostly 
complete, and currently enabled on fr.wikisource.org.
* PicturePopups. This is an AJAX-based extension to display image licensing 
information in a popup over the image. The client-side developer is zocky. 
Work is ongoing.
* JOrbisPlayer. Greg Maxwell is the client-side developer, he has created a 
demo on the toolserver at http://tinyurl.com/fsbu7 . We are in the 
specification development stage.
These have all come about because the client-side developers have approached 
me on IRC, asking some question about server interfaces or performance. In 
the future, I may approach the developers of popular client-side features 
myself, with a proposition to bring their feature to a wider audience. Lupin 
in particular is on my list, although he may not know it yet.
So although we may not be getting dynamic editor lists on edit pages any 
time soon, all is not lost in the realm of collaborative development. There 
are lots of exciting opportunities.
-- Tim Starling