Forum:WoWWiki AddOn Updater

As some of you may be aware, WoWInterface is developing an AddOn updater which will allow other sites to create their own modules to serve AddOn updates from this site (as well as show news, ads, or whatever content is necessary, apparently).

I wanted to see if there was any interest to create a WoWWiki module (to serve AddOns from WoWWiki). This is very preliminary and don't get your hopes up or anything, but there has been some level of approval from Wikia, at least from a capability point of view.

Let me know if you have any opinion one way or another. Also, we should probably get some sort of list going about what it would take to get this in place. Thank you for your input. -- 19:26, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * For my part, as "the Wikia guy", I don't want to impose limits at this point - all ideas and thoughts are welcome. Naturally, I'll be here for any feedback, and I'll be collating ideas off-wiki to present to Wikia. One thing I would note, however, is that we'd ideally be able to generalize anything we create to help other wikis too (e.g. other MMOs, RTS maps, programmer wikis). 20:21, 21 May 2009 (UTC)


 * I'm still trying to wrap my head around this. I am a Java developer by trade, but I do web applications, services, database - this is some kind of remote service interface with GUI programming, if I'm reading it right.


 * So I find their documentation pretty confusing so far - I just need a couple high level paragraphs to reign in scope. Then again maybe this is just because I haven't used OSGi yet. I think it's an actual application you download and run on your computer, like a curse updater? Here's all the relavent info if anyone else wants to try to evaluate it:


 * MMOUI Minion FAQ
 * MMOUI Minion API & Documentation
 * Wikipedia: OSGi
 * OSGi Alliance Homepage
 * Apache Felix, OSGi implementation
 * OSGi Javadoc
 * MMOUI Minion Prelim Javadoc


 * -Howbizr (talk) 13:59, 28 May 2009 (UTC)


 * No offense, but I would have preferred that native applications were made for this updater. In my experience Java is slow to startup and is sort of a memory hog. As for a WoWWiki module, I prefer we get our general AddOn house in order before we work on this. We've been kind of arbitrary about the info we've allowed for AddOns. We don't have a specific policy, but many admins have interpreted AddOn pages to mean that some AddOn info pages that were not hosted should not be allowed, so we have very few AddOn articles compared to the many known, useful ones available. -- Fandyllic  (talk &middot; contr) 11:34 AM PST 29 May 2009
 * Well, Java does have the advantage of being compatible with most OS's with the same codebase, but definitely creating our own application would be something to consider. And I agree that obviously we'd need to support AddOns more actively to really engage on this. -- 18:39, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
 * On your more modest computers "memory hog" and "slow to start up" are an unavoidable trade-off for cross-operating system compatibility (Unix and Windows). However in 2009 on a gaming computer, I'd be pretty surprised if that was really as bad as you think (perhaps you're thinking of the Java 1 browser applets from 1998 which were pretty horrible). I don't know if you use Wow web stats, but it uses a native Java client, and I find it's resource needs acceptable.
 * In contrast to my profession, however, I do not write client applications. Everything I write is server side, so it's a different ball game. -Howbizr (talk) 14:45, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * As Kirkburn knows, i've got a new addon updater in the works unlike any others out there atm. It'll be on a new framework that's been created, one that's open to all (authors, hosts, services etc.). Rather than a module for an existing app, the intent is for new applications to be built on it or incoperated into existing ones. I can't really say anymore until the first implementation is ready to showcase the framework though, but it would be far simpler for wowwiki to support and rather open in how the provider whishes to serve things. -- 08:51, 22 July 2009 (UTC)