Cross-posting from wikitech-l, this will definitely be of interest to those of you on this list who work with our APIs.
Begin forwarded message: > From: Gabriel Wicke <gwi...@wikimedia.org> > Date: March 10, 2015 at 15:23:03 PDT > To: Wikimedia developers <wikitec...@lists.wikimedia.org>, > wikitech-ambassd...@lists.wikimedia.org, Development and Operations Engineers > <engineer...@lists.wikimedia.org>, mediawiki-...@lists.wikimedia.org > Subject: [Engineering] Wikimedia REST content API is now available in beta > > Hello all, > I am happy to announce the beta release of the Wikimedia REST Content API at > https://rest.wikimedia.org/ > Each domain has its own API documentation, which is auto-generated from > Swagger API specs. For example, here is the link for the English Wikipedia: > https://rest.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia.org/v1/?doc > At present, this API provides convenient and low-latency access to article > HTML, page metadata and content conversions between HTML and wikitext. After > extensive testing we are confident that these endpoints are ready for > production use, but have marked them as 'unstable' until we have also > validated this with production users. You can start writing applications that > depend on it now, if you aren't afraid of possible minor changes before > transitioning to 'stable' status. For the definition of the terms ‘stable’ > and ‘unstable’ see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_versioning . > While general and not specific to VisualEditor, the selection of endpoints > reflects this release's focus on speeding up VisualEditor. By storing private > Parsoid round-trip information separately, we were able to reduce the HTML > size by about 40%. This in turn reduces network transfer and processing > times, which will make loading and saving with VisualEditor faster. We are > also switching from a cache to actual storage, which will eliminate slow > VisualEditor loads caused by cache misses. Other users of Parsoid HTML like > Flow, HTML dumps, the OCG PDF renderer or Content translation will benefit > similarly. > But, we are not done yet. In the medium term, we plan to further reduce the > HTML size by separating out all read-write metadata. This should allow us to > use Parsoid HTML with its semantic markup directly for both views and editing > without increasing the HTML size over the current output. Combined with > performance work in VisualEditor, this has the potential to make switching to > visual editing instantaneous and free of any scrolling. > We are also investigating a sub-page-level edit API for micro-contributions > and very fast VisualEditor saves. HTML saves don't necessarily have to wait > for the page to re-render from wikitext, which means that we can potentially > make them faster than wikitext saves. For this to work we'll need to minimize > network transfer and processing time on both client and server. > More generally, this API is intended to be the beginning of a multi-purpose > content API. Its implementation (RESTBase) is driven by a declarative Swagger > API specification, which helps to make it straightforward to extend the API > with new entry points. The same API spec is also used to auto-generate the > aforementioned sandbox environment, complete with handy "try it" buttons. So, > please give it a try and let us know what you think! > This API is currently unmetered; we recommend that users not perform more > than 200 requests per second and may implement limitations if necessary. > I also want to use this opportunity to thank all contributors who made this > possible: > - Marko Obrovac, Eric Evans, James Douglas and Hardik Juneja on the Services > team worked hard to build RESTBase, and to make it as extensible and clean as > it is now. > - Filippo Giunchedi, Alex Kosiaris, Andrew Otto, Faidon Liambotis, Rob > Halsell and Mark Bergsma helped to procure and set up the Cassandra storage > cluster backing this API. > - The Parsoid team with Subbu Sastry, Arlo Breault, C. Scott Ananian and Marc > Ordinas i Llopis is solving the extremely difficult task of converting > between wikitext and HTML, and built a new API that lets us retrieve and pass > in metadata separately. > - On the MediaWiki core team, Brad Jorsch quickly created a minimal > authorization API that will let us support private wikis, and Aaron Schulz, > Alex Monk and Ori Livneh built and extended the VirtualRestService that lets > VisualEditor and MediaWiki in general easily access external services. > > We welcome your feedback here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:RESTBase - > and in Phabricator. > > Sincerely -- > Gabriel Wicke > Principal Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation > _______________________________________________ > Engineering mailing list > engineer...@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/engineering
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