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Two weeks ago, I stumbled upon a two-part blog post by Alex Russell, titled Effective Standards Work.

The first part (The Lay Of The Land) sets the stage. The second part (Threading the Needle) attempts to draw conclusions.

It’s worth reading if you’re interested in how Drupal is developed, or in how any consensus-driven open source project works (rather than the increasingly common “controlled by a single corporate entity” “open source”).

It’s written with empathy, modesty and honesty. It shows the struggle of somebody given the task and opportunity to help shape/improve the developer experience of many, but not necessarily the resources to make it happen. I’m grateful he posted it, because something like this is not easy to write nor publish — which he also says himself:

I’ve been drafting and re-drafting versions of this post for almost 4 years. In that time I’ve promised a dozen or more people that I had a post in process that talked about these issues, but for some of the reasons I cited at the beginning, it has never seemed a good time to hit “Publish”. To those folks, my apologies for the delay.

This is an ode to the Drupal Association.

Two big “maintainability” milestones have been hit in the past few days:

1. rest.module now is in a maintainable state

For the first time ever, the issue tracker for the rest.module Drupal core component fits on a single page: https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/drupal?component=rest.module. 48 46 open issues, of which several are close to RTBC, so that number will likely still go down. Breakdown:

• 19 of those 48 are feature requests.
• 6 are “plan” issues.
• At least 10 issues are related to “REST views” — for which we are only fixing critical bugs.
• And 12 are postponed — blocked on other subsystems usually.

(There is overlap among those breakdown bullets.)

Finally the REST module is getting to a place where it is maintainable and we’re not extinguishing whatever the current fire is! It’s been a long road, but we’re getting there!

This blog post summarizes the 572 comments spanning 5 years and 2 months to get REST file upload support in #1927648 committed. Many thanks to everyone who contributed!

From February 2013 until the end of March 2017, issue #1927648 mostly … lingered. On April 3 of 2017, damiankloip posted an initial patch for an approach he’d been working on for a while, thanks to Acquia (my employer) sponsoring his time. Exactly one year later his work is committed to Drupal core. Shaped by the input of dozens of people! Just look at that commit message!

Background: API-First Drupal: file uploads!.

Drupal 8’s REST API has been maturing steadily since the Drupal 8.0.0 was released in November 2015. One of the big missing features has been file upload support. As of April 3 2018, Drupal 8.6 will support it, when it ships in September 2018! See the change record for the practical consequences: https://www.drupal.org/node/2941420.

It doesn’t make sense for me to repeat what is already written in that change record: that already has both a tl;dr and a practical example.

What I’m going to do instead, is give you a high-level overview of what it took to get to this point: why it took so long, which considerations went into it, why this particular approach was chosen. You could read the entire issue (#1927648), but … it’s one of the longest issues in Drupal history, at 572 comments¹. You would probably need at least an entire workday to read it all! It’s also one of the longest commit messages ever, thanks to the many, many people who shaped it over the years:

Now that Drupal 8’s REST API ¹ has reached the next level of maturity, I think a concise blog post summarizing the most important API-First Initiative improvements for every minor release is going to help a lot of developers. Drupal 8.5.0 will be released next week and the RC was tagged last week. So, let’s get right to it!

The REST API made a big step forward with the 5th minor release of Drupal 8 — I hope you’ll like these improvements :)

Thanks to everyone who contributed!

1. text fields’ computed processed property exposed #2626924

   No more need to re-implement this in consumers nor work-arounds.

This blog has been quiet for the last year and a half, because I don’t like to announce things until I feel comfortable recommending them. Until today!

Since July 2016, API-First Drupal became my primary focus, because Dries felt this was one of the most important areas for Drupal’s future. Together with the community, I triaged the issue queue, and helped determine the most important bugs to fix and improvements to add. That’s how we ended up with REST: top priorities for Drupal … plan issues for each Drupal 8 minor:

The first release of the CDN module for Drupal was 9.5 years ago yesterday: cdn 5.x-1.0-beta1 was released on January 8, 2008!

Excitement

On January 27, 2008, the first RC followed, with boatloads of new features. Over the years, it was ported to Drupal 6¹, 7 and 8 and gained more features (I effectively added every single feature that was requested — I loved empowering the site builder). I did the same with my Hierarchical Select module.

I was a Computer Science student for the first half of those 9.5 years, and it was super exciting to see people actually use my code on hundreds, thousands and even tens of thousands of sites! In stark contrast with the assignments at university, where the results were graded, then discarded.

I deleted my Facebook account because in the past three years, I barely used it. It’s ironic, considering I worked there. ¹

More irony: I never used it as much as I did when I worked there.

Yet more irony: a huge portion of my Facebook news feed was activity by a handful of Facebook employees. ²

No longer useful

I used to like Facebook because it delivered on its original mission:

Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.

They’re clearly no longer true to that mission. ³

When I joined in November 2007, the news feed chronologically listed status updates from your friends. Great!

Since then, they’ve done every imaginable thing to increase time spent, also known as the euphemistic “engagement”. They’ve done this by surfacing friends’ likes, suggested likes, friends’ replies, suggested friends, suggested pages to like based on prior likes, and of course: ads. Those things are not only distractions, they’re actively annoying.

Almost a year ago, BigPipe was the first experimental module added to Drupal 8. It was still experimental in Drupal 8.2 (October 2016), but it was upgraded from alpha to beta stability. Later today, Drupal 8.3.0 is going to be released, and BigPipe is now stable!

Install it!

BigPipe is a zero-risk module. So … why not install it right now? You can uninstall it at any time. It won’t cause problems in any browser, on any web server, or with any proxy. Because:

There is zero risk of data loss. And when the environment — i.e. web server or (reverse) proxy — doesn’t support streaming, then BigPipe-delivered responses behave as if BigPipe was not installed. Nothing breaks, you just go back to the same perceived performance as before.

If you’re still on Drupal 8.2 for a while — also install it! There are no functional changes for BigPipe between 8.3 and 8.2.

Stability

In hindsight, we could have made BigPipe stable from day one, or at least in Drupal 8.2.