009 Larry Garfield and The Future of Drupal Core - Modules Unraveled Podcast

Larry Garfield (@Crell), who is the "Web Services and Context Core Initiative Lead", talks to me about WSCCI and how it will fundamentally change the way Drupal's back-end will function in Drupal 8. He starts out by talking about what web services are and how they work, then he talks about how Drupal 8 will incorporate REST and Symfony2 into core. He also gives an idea of how this will (or will not) affect Drupal module developers and site builders.

Items Mentioned in this Episode

Larry on Drupal.org

Larry on Twitter

Refocusing WSCCI (most recent blog post)

Dries’ blog post about WSCCI

The Configuration Management Initiative (CMI)

The CMI main patch

Blog: Palantir.net

Blog: garfieldtech.com

Kiwi (the "Emu to Solr" bridge)

Sarnia (the Drupal to Solr improved bridge)

Planet PHP (every PHP developer should follow this)

The IRC channel where Larry hangs out: #drupal-wscci

Comments

Good Talk

Permalink Submitted by Mike DeWolfe on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 12:41.

This is a great talk! I really feel Crell's pain when it comes to "reaching down Drupal's throat."
I find that Drupal has two massive shortcoming that it sounds like he is working to address:
- The time to first byte can be a lifetime. That hang time while the hamsters run is a killer for production.
- The object models. In analyzing Views and Node outputs I will get a print_r() of the objects and I am amazed at how much duplications are present. That really contributes to bloat and makes Drupal responses bulky to manage.
When I develop sites, I will often put a flush(); command at the top of the page.tpl.php for my themes to get first byte alive to happen as soon as possible to mitigate the hamster factor.
I'm totally going to figure out what's-what with Symfony2 (http://symfony.com/). And AMEN! to mentioning that Drupal people learned PHP as opposed to PHP people learning Drupal (the latter was my situation).
Lastly, hearing that a post-Features config strategy is coming is really welcome.