XB week 20: 0.1.0-alpha during DrupalCon!

DrupalCon week! On Monday, we landed the last issue to achieve the 0.1 milestone: The XB annotations and labels should not change size when zooming — thanks Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”, Atul “soaratul” Dubey and Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri for guiding it across the finish line!

That was the only noteworthy commit of the week, because of Acquia’s team working full-time on Experience Builder (XB), Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins, Jesse “jessebaker” Baker, Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee and Bálint (he helped us achieve 0.1 on Monday and traveled on Tuesday!) were attending DrupalCon. Also at DrupalCon was Dave “longwave” Long, who we’re sponsoring part time.

So it was with a lot of satisfaction that I tagged the 0.1.0-alpha1 release on the morning of the DriesNote :)

Not at DrupalCon: research mode

With roughly half of the team at DrupalCon this week, and with 0.1.0 done, the rest of us pivoted to preparing for the next milestone: 0.2.0. Many technical details need to be figured out for the next batch of product requirements that Lauri prioritized (together with Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein).

We started research on:

• #3475672: auto-saving, drafts, and all possible ways to achieve that, led by Ted “tedbow” Bowman and with the much-needed help of both Travis “traviscarden” Carden and Dave
• #3475363: in-UI (JS) component creation Proof-of-Concept using StackBlitz by Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang and (newly joined!) Xinran “xinran” Cao, led by Alex
• #3475584: blocks-as-XB-components, led by Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis and with the help of Dave and I, while reusing and building on top of the work that Lee “larowlan” Rowlands did ~2 months ago
• #3446434: Document “Semi-Coupled Theme Engine” and “Redux-integrated Field Widgets” components, kickstarted by me, because we proved this can work but now it’s time to mature this; this will be led by Ben, with again input from Dave ¹

XB data model meeting — 50/50 remote & in-person

During DrupalCon, Lauri, Ted, Alex, I met with with core committers Alex Pott, catch and Dave met to discuss XB’s JSON-based data storage model that XB currently implements. We’re not yet fully aligned (catch pointed out the search index aspect is important to support — the question is how to support that without compromising the UX Lauri envisions), but the discussion is much clearer today than it was in June, because there’s now concrete code to point to. That removed a lot of confusion on both “sides” (we’re all on the same side: we want the brightest future for Drupal!).

The meeting we had during DrupalCon led to:

1. Alex Bronstein identifying a possible alternative implementation that would meet both the original goals, and address most concerns: #3477428: Refactor the XB field type to be multi-valued, to de-jsonify the tree, and to reference the field_union type of the prop values.
2. Me unpostponing the #3467870: Support {type: array, …} prop shapes issue and pushing it forward. First making this work would help prevent #3477428 (see prior point) going in a direction that would make it impossible to support type: array Single Directory Component (SDC) props, which should be represented by multi-value fields (fields configured for multiple cardinality). I made the back-end pieces work during DrupalCon, but to make it work end-to-end additional infrastructure on the client side is needed first. For that: see the last “research” bullet above.

Presentations at DrupalCon

Of course, Dries included and demonstrated Experience Builder 0.1.0 during the DriesNote:

Lauri talked about what’s been happening with XB and what will happen next:

After his session, Lauri had many hallway conversations that increased our conviction that we’re on the right track with XB! :)

And in my humble opinion the most inspiring — Ben’s session about how XB uses parts of the JSX theme engine and Redux:

You have to watch the 20 seconds starting at 1:37 — pure genius: not the predictable AI-generated images to illustrate his talk, instead … his son’s drawings! :D

I hope to follow in his footsteps at a future DrupalCon, because I too am becoming a dad, very soon! :D I’ll be working at a very reduced rate during my paternity leave, but will be keeping these weekly blog posts going — it’s my way of keeping myself in the loop as well as all of you. That is also why I’ve shifted attention to meta things, to ensure the right expertise is present in areas that need to keep moving during my upcoming paternity leave :)

Week 20 was September 23–29, 2024.