There has been a lot of talk over the last year or so of how and when
to move MediaWiki to a service oriented architecture [0]. So much so
that it is actually one of the a marquee topics at the upcoming
Developer Summit.
I think the problem statement for the services RFC is dead on in
describing issues that MediaWiki and the Wikimedia Foundation face
today with the current monolithic MediaWiki implementation. We have
organic entanglements between subsystems that make reasoning about the
code base difficult. We have a growing need to API access to data and
computations that have historically been only presented via generated
HTML. We have cross-team and cross-project communication issues that
lead to siloed implementations and duplication of effort.
The solution to these issues proposed in the RFC is to create
independent services (eg Parsoid, RESTBase) to implement features that
were previously handled by the core MediaWiki application. Thus far
Parsoid is only required if a wiki wants to use VisualEditor. There
has been discussion however of it being required in some future
version of MediaWiki where HTML is the canonical representation of
articles {{citation needed}}. This particular future may or may not be
far off on the calendar, but there are other services that have been
proposed (storage service, REST content API) that are likely to appear
in production use at least for the Foundation projects within the next
year.
One of the bigger questions I have about the potential shift to
requiring services is the fate of shared hosting deployments of
MediaWiki. What will happen to the numerous MediaWiki installs on
shared hosting providers like 1and1, Dreamhost or GoDaddy when running
MediaWiki requires multiple node.js/java/hack/python stand alone
processes to function? Is the MediaWiki community making a conscious
decision to abandon these customers? If so should we start looking for
a suitable replacement that can be recommended and possibly develop
tools to easy the migration away from MediaWiki to another monolithic
wiki application? If not, how are we going to ensure that pure PHP
alternate implementations get equal testing and feature development if
they are not actively used on the Foundation's project wikis?
[0]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Services_and_narrow_int…
Bryan
--
Bryan Davis Wikimedia Foundation <bd808(a)wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]] Sr Software Engineer Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808 v:415.839.6885 x6855