Friends,
I'm helping review a tool https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Ids that I understand Wikimedia Taiwan is eager to use, which uses a parser hook to render ideographic description characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Description_Characters_(Unicode_block) into PNG glyphs in order to display historic or rare characters which aren't covered by Unicode. It's very cool.
The challenges are first that it's based on a Tomcat backend https://github.com/Wikimedia-TW/han3_ji7_tsoo1_kian3_WM/blob/master/src/idsrend/services/IDSrendServlet.java, which I'm not sure is precedented in our current ecosystem, and second that the code uses Chinese variable and function names, which should unfortunately be Anglicized by convention, AIUI. Finally, there might be security issues around the rendered text itself, if it were misused to mask content.
I'm mostly asking this list for help with the question of using Tomcat in production.
Thanks, Adam
Wikitech-l on behalf of Adam Wight wrote:
The challenges are first that it's based on a Tomcat backend [...] which I'm not sure is precedented in our current ecosystem, and second that the code uses Chinese variable and function names, which should unfortunately be Anglicized by convention, AIUI. Finally, there might be security issues around the rendered text itself, if it were misused to mask content.
I'm mostly asking this list for help with the question of using Tomcat in production.
I'm reminded of Hierator, which I believe never made it into production but had a clear implementation path. Some potentially interesting links:
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Hierator * https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89331#1537849
MZMcBride
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 5:14 AM Adam Wight awight@wikimedia.org wrote:
The challenges are first that it's based on a Tomcat backend < https://github.com/Wikimedia-TW/han3_ji7_tsoo1_kian3_WM/blob/master/src/idsr...
,
which I'm not sure is precedented in our current ecosystem, and second that the code uses Chinese variable and function names, which should unfortunately be Anglicized by convention, AIUI. Finally, there might be security issues around the rendered text itself, if it were misused to mask content.
I'm mostly asking this list for help with the question of using Tomcat in production.
So we don't use Tomcat anywhere right now, so yeah that's unprecedented. I did attempt it awhile back for Gerrit (like, years ago), but I found Tomcat to be a huge pain in the butt for basically no gain (in that case).
It's not impossible--there's packages and all that fun stuff for Tomcat and related tooling--but I think that Tomcat generally isn't worth the overhead and maintenance burden for a single service.
-Chad
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 11:02 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 5:14 AM Adam Wight awight@wikimedia.org wrote:
The challenges are first that it's based on a Tomcat backend < https://github.com/Wikimedia-TW/han3_ji7_tsoo1_kian3_WM/
blob/master/src/idsrend/services/IDSrendServlet.java
,
which I'm not sure is precedented in our current ecosystem, and second
that
the code uses Chinese variable and function names, which should unfortunately be Anglicized by convention, AIUI. Finally, there might be security issues around the rendered text itself, if it were misused to
mask
content.
I'm mostly asking this list for help with the question of using Tomcat in production.
So we don't use Tomcat anywhere right now, so yeah that's unprecedented.
Just a note that Tomcat is in use by analytics as part of the Oozie-YARN-Hadoop infrastructure. It's bundled as part of the set of packages, which of course is quite a different thing than setting up and maintaining an instance generally for services.
Ariel
Hello,
With the preamble of my opinion not being an authoritative point of view at all, I should point out that Java/JVM based services are not especially loved in WMF. Ops does not feel it has the capability of supporting them. There are a few around like Gerrit, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Kafka but none of these is actually maintained by ops. All of these have owners/maintainers outside of ops (entire teams in some cases), with varying degrees of success. The question of whether it should be Tomcat or Jetty, is a valid one, but serves to alleviate only part of the problem (it's not like Ops hate tomcat but like Jetty). So, there are probably a few social/administrative issues that it might make sense to address first before handling the technical part.
On Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:13 PM, Adam Wight awight@wikimedia.org wrote:
Friends,
I'm helping review a tool https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Ids that I understand Wikimedia Taiwan is eager to use, which uses a parser hook to render ideographic description characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideographic_Description_Characters_(Unicode_block) into PNG glyphs in order to display historic or rare characters which aren't covered by Unicode. It's very cool.
The challenges are first that it's based on a Tomcat backend https://github.com/Wikimedia-TW/han3_ji7_tsoo1_kian3_WM/blob/master/src/idsrend/services/IDSrendServlet.java, which I'm not sure is precedented in our current ecosystem, and second that the code uses Chinese variable and function names, which should unfortunately be Anglicized by convention, AIUI. Finally, there might be security issues around the rendered text itself, if it were misused to mask content.
I'm mostly asking this list for help with the question of using Tomcat in production.
Thanks, Adam _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org