Wiki written in Ada?

Wiki written in Ada?

[Peter.H.M.Brooks]

I know that there are wikis about Ada, I just wondered (I can't find a
reference) if there's a project to produce a wiki that's written in
Ada.

In particular, I'm interested to know if there's a distributed wiki
model being developed in Ada.

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Peter" == Peter H M Brooks <Peter.H.M.Brooks@gmail.com> writes:

    Peter> I know that there are wikis about Ada, I just wondered (I
    Peter> can't find a reference) if there's a project to produce a
    Peter> wiki that's written in Ada.

    Peter> In particular, I'm interested to know if there's a
    Peter> distributed wiki model being developed in Ada.

I doubt it.

PHP seems to be the language of choice these days for web
applications.

This is beyond my comprehension.

"Everyone else writes web applications in PHP so it must be good!"

Me thinks the speed and robustness of a compiled language would be
ideal for any large scale web application. Not an interpreted language
like PHP.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Peter.H.M.Brooks]

Brian May wrote:
> >>>>> "Peter" == Peter H M Brooks <Peter.H.M.Brooks@gmail.com> writes:
>
>     Peter> I know that there are wikis about Ada, I just wondered (I
>     Peter> can't find a reference) if there's a project to produce a
>     Peter> wiki that's written in Ada.
>
>     Peter> In particular, I'm interested to know if there's a
>     Peter> distributed wiki model being developed in Ada.
>
> I doubt it.
>
> PHP seems to be the language of choice these days for web
> applications.
>
> This is beyond my comprehension.
>
> "Everyone else writes web applications in PHP so it must be good!"
>
> Me thinks the speed and robustness of a compiled language would be
> ideal for any large scale web application. Not an interpreted language
> like PHP.
>
I agree - but it isn't beyond my comprehension! PHP is quick to write,
fairly easy to understand and has intuitive interfaces to the front and
back ends. I'd say that it really was the nature of PHP that brought
about the iea of a wiki in the first place.

A testimony to the ease of writing in PHP is the large number of
separate wiki engines that have been written in it (relative to the
smaller number in things like C and Python).

To my mind, an Open Source Ada wiki would be just as cross-platform
now, much safer to extend and much, much more robust. So it would be a
good project. The overall structure of wikis has become clearer now, so
to draw up a spec. based on the limits of current implementation would
be a useful job all on its own.

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Marius Amado-Alves]

On 10 Sep 2006, at 19:55, Peter.H.M.Brooks@gmail.com wrote:

> ... a wiki that's written in Ada.

That would be the Casbah, available at

http://www.softdevelcoop.org/software/

(still in the old "software" directory, waiting for man-hours to  
update the site ;-)

It's Miai Certified progressive software.

A Casbah system is online at

http://www.liacc.up.pt/cgi-bin/casbah/casbah.cgi

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Peter.H.M.Brooks]

Marius Amado-Alves wrote:
> On 10 Sep 2006, at 19:55, Peter.H.M.Brooks@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > ... a wiki that's written in Ada.
>
> That would be the Casbah, available at
>
> http://www.softdevelcoop.org/software/
>
> (still in the old "software" directory, waiting for man-hours to
> update the site ;-)
>
> It's Miai Certified progressive software.
>
> A Casbah system is online at
>
> http://www.liacc.up.pt/cgi-bin/casbah/casbah.cgi
>
Thank you for that! I'll go and have a look at it...

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Marius Amado-Alves]

>> Me thinks the speed and robustness of a compiled language would be
>> ideal for any large scale web application. Not an interpreted  
>> language
>> like PHP.

> I agree

I also agree so far

> - but it isn't beyond my comprehension! PHP is quick to write,
> fairly easy to understand and has intuitive interfaces to the front  
> and
> back ends.

- now this is exactly the opposed of my view.

> I'd say that it really was the nature of PHP that brought
> about the iea of a wiki in the first place.

Not at all in my view. Not for Casbah [1]. And I'd be surprised if  
Ward's Wiki [2], arguably the first Wiki ever, was written in PHP or  
the like (I think it was in C).

> A testimony to the ease of writing in PHP is the large number of
> separate wiki engines that have been written in it (relative to the
> smaller number in things like C and Python).

These numbers may be true, but to me they do not testify to the  
easiness of PHP. Some years ago (when PHP was in version 3 IIRC) I  
considered using it for web systems, since yes it seemed everybody  
was do it. I found the documentation, and the snippets I saw, very  
hardly understandable. So much for easiness. I used Ada. (Actually I  
wanted to use MAWL, but I was not able to install the compiler.)

So it seems views vary greatly. Or one of us is living in another  
world :-)

[1] BTW don't look at my Casbah expecting excellent Ada code. It was  
one of the first works in Ada by a guy coming from C.

[2] The Portland Patterns Repository at c2.com; incidentally, it  
includes pages on Wiki History, and lists Wiki systems by language-- 
alphabetically, so guess which is the first entry :-)

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Brian May]

>>>>> "Marius" == Marius Amado-Alves <marius@amado-alves.info> writes:

    >> - but it isn't beyond my comprehension! PHP is quick to write,
    >> fairly easy to understand and has intuitive interfaces to the
    >> front and back ends.

    Marius> - now this is exactly the opposed of my view.

PHP is perceived as being quicker to write.

Maybe for small and very simple projects this might be true.

However, as the code size goes up, productivity goes down, and risk of
security problems goes up. After you factor in time wasted due to
debugging security breaches on a web server and not getting
anywhere... What virtual host did the attacker break into? How did an
attacker run wget on this system? How did the attacker execute the IRC
server after downloading it? Did the attacker do any other damage?

When I was writing PHP code regularly, I was amazed when I couldn't
find a version of a system call that will take a list of parameters as
an array instead of running the shell and having the shell split the
parameters. Arggh! Even Perl supports this. (disclaimer: this was PHP
4.0, to the best of my knowledge, PHP 5.0 was the same).

I think it would be an interesting experiment to rewrite something
like Mediawiki in Ada + AWS.
-- 
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>

Re: Wiki written in Ada?

[Marius Amado-Alves]

>>> - but it isn't beyond my comprehension! PHP is quick to write,
>>> fairly easy to understand and has intuitive interfaces to the
>>> front and back ends.
>
>     Marius> - now this is exactly the opposed of my view.
>
> PHP is perceived as being quicker to write.
>
> Maybe for small and very simple projects this might be true.
>
> However, as the code size goes up, productivity goes down, and risk of
> security problems goes up.

Yes. This is not opposed to what I said. The thing is code size goes  
up very quickly. For me 1000 lines is already an indicator of "you  
should be coding in Ada"--and not the large number (1000000?) seen on  
some ads. Of course here we are using "code size" more as a symptom  
of reliability requirements and the corresponding code _complexity_.  
Also efficiency requirements. Clearly requirements for a good wiki.  
In my lab sometimes we use Moodle (PHP) and the Casbah (Ada) for the  
same function (writing something or collecting data collectively).  
The Casbah beats Moodle in speed hands down.