RESTBase seems to have a stable end-point for this. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/data/recommendation/article/creation/translation/es/Banana?count=24

In T190034#4063810, @bmansurov wrote:

RESTBase seems to have a stable end-point for this. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v1/data/recommendation/article/creation/translation/es/Banana?count=24

don't use restbase as a middle-man between our internal services, please.

Services should talk to each other directly, not via a router/proxy/cache. We have done this multiple times here in the last 4 years, and it is an antipattern. Going through restbase for service-to-service communication can only achieve the result of introducing another potential layer of errors.

Thanks for the comment, @Joe. Is it still a good idea to directly talk to computationally expensive services? Wouldn't talking to a caching layer be more appropriate then?

Change 420992 had a related patch set uploaded (by Santhosh; owner: Santhosh):
[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] Use production api of recommendation tool

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/420992

Also reported T190266: Switch the Recommendation API to use the internal WDQS cluster

Changes:

• The production api does not accept algorithm, application, search strategy parameters
• The api can accept only one seed article. This patch uses the latest one from seed articles

In T190034#4063820, @Joe wrote:

don't use restbase as a middle-man between our internal services, please.

We call the API from browsers, not from an internal service or even from PHP side of an extension.

@Pginer-WMF, please not the above changes, especially about seed articles

In T190034#4072272, @santhosh wrote:

@Pginer-WMF, please not the above changes, especially about seed articles

Are we using a different seed article when the user clicks "Refresh"? Would it be possible to do so? Should we create a specific ticket?

Are we using a different seed article when the user clicks "Refresh"?

No.

In T190034#4071964, @Nikerabbit wrote:

In T190034#4063820, @Joe wrote:

don't use restbase as a middle-man between our internal services, please.

We call the API from browsers, not from an internal service or even from PHP side of an extension.

Ok, so technically calling the public rest API is the right thing to do.

In T190034#4063954, @bmansurov wrote:

Thanks for the comment, @Joe. Is it still a good idea to directly talk to computationally expensive services? Wouldn't talking to a caching layer be more appropriate then?

(I am answering even if my answer doesn't apply in this case - as @Nikerabbit pointed out, the browser calls our public REST API, so it's ok in this case).

Caching might be a good idea, but internally you want to have the individual application to manage its own caching, not to have a service that does (poorly or not) the job of a caching edge proxy.

So your call flow should be:

Service A ==> Service B <==> Service B cache

instead of

Service A ===> Cache <==> Service B

because well, Service B should be able to function even if its caching layer is broken or unavailable (maybe with worse performance).

If you happen to use the same caching service for all of your services, and it also happens to be the main router between different services, you end up creating a huge SPOF, so that today the downtime of any of our services is practically the downtime of RESTbase, plus the downtime of the service itself.

So, it's not advisable to use RESTbase as a mediator for internal calls at all.

API accepts only one seed

What does it mean for the feature? Users get worse suggestions? They always get the same suggestions? Are the other unavailable api parameters affecting anything?

I updated patch https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/420992/ so that it takes one seed article at a time. Every refresh will take a new seed page. And if it runs out, we wont use seed. If there is no seed, there is a bug for some language pairs, otherwise we get suggestions. T190266: Switch the Recommendation API to use the internal WDQS cluster

I'm moving this to Blocked because we found an issue with Unicode characters in the RESTBase API.

@santhosh I removed Research tag and I'll remain subscribed to this task to get updates on any follow-ups.

Change 420992 abandoned by Santhosh:

[mediawiki/extensions/ContentTranslation@master] Use production api of recommendation tool

Reason:

No longer working on this

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/420992