After a long talk with Arhuaco, we decided to rewrite Svnwiki from scratch in a programming language easier to learn and more popular than Scheme. We believe that by doing this the number of contributors would grow a lot: as some have previously pointed out, there are many that would like to contribute to Svnwiki but lack the programming skills or the time required to learn Scheme.
So far we are considered mostly PHP and Java. Arhuaco is leaning strongly towards PHP, since, after all, it was a language designed specifically for creating web applications.
I, on the other hand, consider Java a very good alternative. Although it has some things I don't like, I think it would make a very fine choice because
- it has been proved to scale to a great scale,
- we will very soon have a free software implementation,
- it is a very well-known language (ie. a lot of people know how to code on it),
- it tends to make the code very easy to maintain and
- it will probably run significantly faster than PHP.
We also considered C# (with the Mono implementation) and Python, but we'll likely stick with either Java or PHP, unless a good case is made for another language.
What do you think?
Update: Yes, this was an April Fools joke. :-) I don't plan to rewrite Svnwiki in any other language. As a matter of fact, I first started writing it in Python.
Discussion (17)Last update: 2007-04-15 (Rev 11093)