[iRail] iRail API

Fri Apr 8 17:04:10 UTC 2011

Hey guys,

Let me first quickly introduce myself: I'm a freelance open source
developer, mainly focusing on MediaWiki, Semantic MediaWiki and related
extensions. I've been doing this for the last 2 years, so like to think I
have some experience with PHP and related stuff :) I'm also a member of the
hackerspace in Brussels and the one in Gent.

Yesterday I had a look at the iRail API and found several things that can be
done better. These include autoloding of classes, i18n support where
applicable, structured handling of parameters, only a single entry point,
and several others. I realized I was pretty much comparing the iRail API to
the MediaWiki one, which I think is quite well designed and more powerful
then the iRail one. This is not very surprising considering the amount of
usage this API has and how much more development on it has been done then on
the iRail API, so don't take this observation the wrong way - I think the
work done on iRail is absolutely great. I've been playing with the idea of
forking the MW API into some stand alone thing that can easily be used for
whatever for a while now, as it seems pretty easy to do, and can save a lot
of time reinventing the wheel for projects that need a PHP-based API. I
quickly wrote down some more stuff about this here [0].

I've not come around to making such a fork since it hardly seems worth the
effort for the single use case I have for it (some project at the Ghent
hackerspace). If the iRail devs think this could be useful, I might just go
ahead and do the work. So please have a look at this and let me know your
thoughts. Also, if something is not clear, I'd be happy to clarify :)

[0] http://wiki.bn2vs.com/PHP_API

Cheers

--
Jeroen De Dauw
http://www.bn2vs.com
Don't panic. Don't be evil.
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