Dot Net Solutions released a new version of its Wikipedia Explorer built on top of Windows Azure. Of course this is built in partnership with Microsoft developer and platform evangelism team, so I’m not sure if is just a prof of concept or an actual product that will evolve later. Nonetheless, the project is interesting and is one of the few applications out there using windows azure.
The project is about visualizing relationships between documents within Wikipedia - creating a new browsing experience in Windows Presentation Foundation.
In the original version all the data was downloaded from Wikipedia on the fly. This was very simple, but also very slow and meant different visualisations would be produced each time based on which links were downloaded first.Wikipedia does have a database dump available which contains a complete snapshot of the whole site however. The problem is the dump is enormous. Converting from wikicode (the proprietary format it is stored in) to XML/XAML is very processor intensive. On a single high-powered server it would take somewhere in the region of 4-6 months to complete.
By building the application on top of Windows Azure the process is scaled out to a large number of servers. It currently runs on 50 server instances. The same process that would have taken up to 6 months took a little over 4 days – almost exactly 1/50th the time, demonstrating the power of the Azure Services platform, it is easy to scale out processor intensive tasks and have them complete much faster by provisioning more hardware.
Wikipedia Explorer is currently featuring in the keynote of the MSDN Developer Conference road show across America.
You can try Wikipedia Explorer for yourself here. Looks like it doesn’t run in Windows 7 build 7000.
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