Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Options Rating

[LamontStormstar]

Should Wikipedia's software be rewritten in Ruby on Rails? Discuss.

[LamontStormstar]

Java would probably be even slower than PHP. Whenever I go to a website with a java applet, if it is really complex it slows my computer way down.

I know mediawiki spends a whole bunch a month on server costs alone so more efficient coding would save them a lot of mine. I forgot the number and the last time I looked was quite a ways back but my guess is they spend per month about 1/10th of what one of those rich executives the USA gave trillions of dollars to (in the bailout that after it passed the stock markets crashed because investors thought it was a bad bill) spend per day on executive retreats.

So mediawiki spends a lot.

I wouldn't be sure the right language, though I've heard ruby on rails is the new thing. There's also python.

This post has been edited by LamontStormstar:

[Kelly Martin]

Java would probably be even slower than PHP. Whenever I go to a website with a java applet, if it is really complex it slows my computer way down.

Server side Java is nothing like client-side java. The slowness you're experiencing is due to your browser launching a JVM inside the browser. Server side Java doesn't have this problem; the JVM is already running in the server and all you get is the same HTML you'd get from the PHP app -- it's just generated that much faster. A properly implemented Java webapp will run rings around a PHP app.

MediaWiki runs 25% faster just by running it within Quercus, which is pretty much just a PHP interpreter written in Java. A full reimplementation in Java would be 50% to 75% faster.

I doubt that a Ruby on Rails implementation would be that much faster as RoR is, like PHP, a fully interpreted language (although the odds are that the RoR interpreter is more efficient than PHP, as PHP's is just about the worst-performing interpreter there is in common use). Java is at least compiled to JVM code. The only way to get faster than that would be to go to a fully compiled language like C or C++.