Acquia

I spent about a week of my time at Acquia on improving Drupal 8’s REST support.

That time was spent fixing, reviewing, triaging and documenting.

Drupal 8’s REST works very well, we just have to make it more friendly & helpful, remove Drupalisms and support more REST capabilities.

Fixing, reviewing & triaging

I went through the entire issue queues of rest.module, serialization.module and hal.module. I was able to mark about a dozen bug reports as duplicates, fix a dozen or so support requests, have reviewed probably a few dozen patches, rerolled about a dozen patches, created at least another dozen patches and … triaged 100% of the open issues. I clarified titles of >30 issues.

I’m happy to announce that Fabian Franz and I managed to get a first release of BigPipe published today, coinciding with the Drupal 8.0.0 release!

Rather than explaining what it does, see for yourself:

(That’s with 2 slow blocks that take 3 s to render. Only one is cacheable. Hence the page load takes ~6 s with cold caches, ~3 s with warm caches.)

Go download BigPipe 8.x-1.0-beta1![^1]

Fastest Drupal yet!

After Drupal 8 already shipping with both the Page Cache and Dynamic Page Cache enabled by default earlier, this is the third and final step in our quest to make the entire web fast.

• Fast anonymous user page loads: Page Cache — entire page is cached.
• Fast authenticated user page loads: BigPipe — majority of page including main content is cached (thanks to Dynamic Page Cache) and sent first, the rest is rendered later and streamed.

Go and enjoy the fastest Drupal yet![^2]

Later today, Drupal 8 will be released! At this time, good docs are of course crucial.

As the maintainer and de facto co-maintainer of several Drupal 8 core modules and subsystems, I spent the last several days making sure that the documentation is up-to-date for:

• the Text Editor module (editor)
• the CKEditor module (ckeditor)
• the Quick Edit module (quickedit)
• the Filter module (filter)
• the Cache system
• the Render system (specifically the render caching part)
• the Asset Library system

The following drupal.org handbook pages have either received minor updates, received complete overhauls or were written from scratch:

Drupal 8 now has a Dynamic Page Cache. The Page Cache module only works for anonymous users, the Dynamic Page Cache module takes that a step further: it works for any user.

Since April 8, Drupal 8 had its Page Cache enabled by default. Exactly 5 months later, on September 8, the Dynamic Page Cache¹ module was added to Drupal 8, and also enabled by default.

What?

The Page Cache module caches fully rendered HTML responses — it assumes only one variant of each response exists, which is only true for anonymous users². The innovation in 8 on top of 7’s Page Cache is the addition of cache tags, which allow one to use the Page Cache but still have instantaneous updates: no more stale content.

At least 20 people helped push one or more issues forward in Montpellier, at the Drupal Dev Days Performance Sprint!

Here’s an overview of what we set out to do, what we did, and what the next steps are.