Drupal

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.

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.