Several people had a meeting last week to start answering the question:
What do our SOA plans look like for the next
fiscal year? How much
of this work will be spent refactoring MW Core, vs. augmenting with
new, non-MediaWiki framework(s)?
Here's my summary of what we agreed on last week and what we still need
to work out. (Participants included WMF engineers, Wikia engineers, and
Markus Glaser.)
Agreed:
* Modularity is a good thing
* WMF will start inviting a Wikia engineer to the weekly "scrum of
scrums" meeting
* Wikia will have an all-team meeting in May in SF - will then compare
notes with WMF about what toolset they're choosing for WikiFactory & the
new mobile article page prototype
(Please also see lines 240-252 of the full notes for SOA risks and
deliverables we'll need from service providers:
http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/soa-kickoff )
Undecided:
* what parts of MediaWiki will be refactored to follow in Parsoid's
footsteps, who is going to do that, and when
* what the working group's concrete targets would be, and who would be in it
* what languages to write services in
* whether Rashomon will only have a REST API or a PHP one as well
* how to communicate between WMF and Wikia (wikitech-l? a different
list? lightweight IRC meetings?)
* who is Wikia's negotiating partner at WMF, who can authoritatively
decide which languages/tools MediaWiki will use
Given this, I'll continue working on architectural guidelines that
prescribe modularity in general but don't specifically call for SOA in
all new features.
Thanks.
--
Sumana Harihareswara
Senior Technical Writer
Wikimedia Foundation