Coder Expectations

Programming is, in several aspects, both a technical skill and art, as well as an endless expectations refactoring effort.

For instance, I have a project where I’m being asked to implement a mediawiki instance within a RoR application. People, I believe, have learned to accept my answer that an integration between RoR and MediaWiki is impossible. They wanted the mediawiki content to appear in a tab inside the application, and appear to be a part of the existing site. Short of some crazy hacks involving parsing an external wiki’s HTML output, and inserting content into it’s database via the rails app, or doing some nasty iframe crud, I can’t see how on earth I could manage this.

So, instead people now want me to find a RoR wiki, and import the contents of these mediawiki’s into the new RoR one.

Sure. Except there isn’t a reliable way to parse mediawiki’s meta language, and things like templates and the like make it a near impossibility. Getting a wiki up on rails isn’t a problem, it’s getting the data from another wiki that’s the problem. Not going to happen.

So, now I get to explain this. And I’m guaranteed to make people unhappy. They may even seek an outside opinion. Fine. Any “Yes” answer they receive will invariably involve hacking something up fierce, and that is not the kinda thing I commit myself to. Yuk.