On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Gabriel Wicke gwicke@wikimedia.org wrote:
Apart from making the data generally available, using a web API means that the execution can be parallelized / distributed and potentially cached. It also tends to lead to narrow interfaces with explicit handling of state.
It would also mean that MediaWiki would be making uncontrolled API calls *during the page parse*. That would probably not work out too well; I know on my local test wiki it's a pain just having to wait for the ForeignAPIRepo calls for images.