Drupal

8 April, 2018

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:

2 March, 2018

API-First Drupal: what's new in 8.5?

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.

8 December, 2017

API-First Drupal — really!

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:

6 November, 2017

Rendering & caching: a journey through the layers

The Drupal render pipeline and its caching capabilities have been the subject of quite a few talks of mine and of multiple writings. But all of those were very technical, very precise.

Over the past year and a half I’d heard multiple times there was a need for a more pragmatic talk, where only high-level principles are explained, and it is demonstrated how to step through the various layers with a debugger. So I set out to do just that.

I figured it made sense to spend 10–15 minutes explaining (using a hand-drawn diagram that I spent a lot of time tweaking) and spend the rest of the time stepping through things live. Yes, this was frightening. Yes, there were last-minute problems (my IDE suddenly didn’t allow font size scaling …), but it seems overall people were very satisfied :)

Have you seen and heard of Render API (with its render caching, lazy builders and render pipeline), Cache API (and its cache tags & contexts), Dynamic Page Cache, Page Cache and BigPipe? Have you cursed them, wondered about them, been confused by them?

I will show you three typical use cases:

  1. An uncacheable block
  2. A personalized block
  3. A cacheable block that you can see if you have a certain permission and that should update whenever some entity is updated

… and for each, will take you on the journey through the various layers: from rendering to render caching, on to Dynamic Page Cache and eventually Page Cache … or BigPipe.

Coming out of this session, you should have a concrete understanding of how these various layers cooperate, how you as a Drupal developer can use them to your advantage, and how you can test that it’s behaving correctly.

I’m a maintainer of Dynamic Page Cache and BigPipe, and an effective co-maintainer of Render API, Cache API and Page Cache.

Preview:

See https://events.drupal.org/vienna2017/sessions/rendering-caching-journey-through-layers.

Attendees: 200

Evalutations: 4.6/5

Thanks for the explanation. Your sketches about the rendering process and how dynamic cache, page cache and big pipe work together ; are awesome. It is very clear no for me.

Best session for me on DC. Good examples, loved the live demo, these live demo’s are much more helpful to me as a developer then static slides. General comments, not related to the speaker. The venue was to small for this talk and should have been on a larger stage. Also the location next to the exhibition stands made it a bit noisy when sitting in the back.

Great presentation! I really liked the hand-drawn figure and live demo, they made it really easy to understand and follow. The speaking was calm but engaging. It was great that you were so flexible on the audience feedback.
Conference
Drupalcon Vienna
Date
Location
Vienna, Austria
Video
YouTube
Duration
60 minutes
9 July, 2017

On simplicity & maintainability: CDN module for Drupal 8

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.

22 March, 2017

Backwards Compatibility: Burden & Benefit

In my job at Acquia, I’ve been working almost exclusively on Drupal 8 core. In 2012–2013 I worked on authoring experience (in-place editing, CKEditor, and more). In 2014–2015, I worked on performance, cacheability, rendering and generally the stabilizing of Drupal 8. Drupal 8.0.0 shipped on November 19, 2015. And since then, I’ve spent most of my time on making Drupal 8 be API-first: improving the RESTful Web Services support that Drupal 8 ships with, and in the process also strengthening the JSON API & GraphQL contributed modules.

In the process, I’ve learned a lot about the impact of past decisions (by myself and others) on backwards compatibility. The benefit of backwards compatibility (BC). But the burden of ensuring BC can increase exponentially due to certain architectural decisions. I’ve been experiencing that first-hand, since I’m tasked with making Drupal 8’s REST support rock-solid, where I am seeing time and time again that “fixing bugs + improving DX” requires BC breaks. Tough decisions.

In this talk (which will be a core conversation at DrupalCon Baltimore), I analyzed the architectural patterns in Drupal 8, and provided suggestions on how to do better. I don’t have all the answers. But what matters most is not answers, but a critical mindset going forward that is consciously considering BC implications for every patch that goes into Drupal 8!

Not thoroughly considering new interfaces (API surface) risks making the software unmaintainable!

Preview:

See https://events.drupal.org/baltimore2017/sessions/backwards-compatibility-burden-benefit + https://seville2017.drupaldays.org/sessions/backwards-compatibility-burden-benefit.

Conference
Drupal Dev Days Seville 2017 + DrupalCon Baltimore
Date
Location
Seville, Spain + Baltimore, USA
Duration
50 minutes
20 February, 2017

Ode to OpenTracker

This is an ode to Dirk Engling’s OpenTracker.

It’s a BitTorrent tracker.

It’s what powered The Pirate Bay in 2007–2009.

I’ve been using it to power the downloads on http://driverpacks.net since the end of November 2010. >6 years. It facilitated 9839566 downloads since December 1, 2010 until today. That’s almost 10 million downloads!

Stability

It’s one of the most stable pieces of software I ever encountered. I compiled it in 2010, it never once crashed. I’ve seen uptimes of hundreds of days.

20 April, 2016

Drupal 8.1: BigPipe as an experimental module

Today, Drupal 8.1 has been released and it includes BigPipe as an experimental module.

Six months ago, on the day of the release of Drupal 8, the BigPipe contrib module was released.

So BigPipe was first prototyped in contrib, then moved into core as an experimental module.

Experimental module?

Quoting d.o/core/experimental:

Experimental modules allow core contributors to iterate quickly on functionality that may be supported in an upcoming minor release and receive feedback, without needing to conform to the rigorous requirements for production versions of Drupal core.

…

Experimental modules allow site builders and contributed project authors to test out functionality that might eventually be included as a stable part of Drupal core.

With your help (in other words: by testing), we can help BigPipe “graduate” as a stable module in Drupal 8.2. This is the sort of module that needs wider testing because it changes how pages are delivered, so before it can be considered stable, it must be tested in as many circumstances as possible, including the most exotic ones.

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