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.

Brian May wrote:
"Peter" == Peter H M Brooks <Peter.H.M.Brooks@gmail.comwrites:

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

PeterIn particular, I'm interested to know if there's a
Peterdistributed 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 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.

>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. 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 :-)

- 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" not the large number (1000000?) seen on
some ads. 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.