English WSCCI

I think most people have finally recovered from DrupalCon London (woohoo!), so it's time to pause and take stock of all that happened. London was actually a huge boost for the Web Services and Context Core Initiative (WSCCI).

Symfony2 is in

First of all, Dries approved our recommendation that Drupal adopt the Symfony2 HttpFoundation classes to handle the incoming request. Granted it was around 2 am in the coder lounge so I don't know if he was awake enough to realize what he was saying, but I'm going to hold him to it. :-)

A patch has been submitted to bring the Symfony2 HttpFoundation and ClassLoader components into core, using PSR-0 autoloading. Reviews and RTBCs are welcome.

As a follow-up, there are other threads discussing how else we could leverage Symfony. In particular, we could use the HttpFoundation component's session handling. More discussion to be had.

Services is on board

I also had a BoF with the Services folks. They're very much on board with everything we're doing, and have decided to make the Services 7.x-4.x branch a model and test-case for WSCCI. They will be adopting the Symfony HttpFoundation component as well, along with the PHP 5.3 dependency that entails. That will get us more experience with it and its quirks, which will feed back into core and context. Hopefully they'll be able to leverage the context work for Drupal 8 core as well, and feed work back and forth.

We can haz sandbox

During DrupalCon London, Stalski and xtfer managed to finish off the last patch we needed before I felt the core context library was "ready" to be tested against core. That meant that during the London Sprint I was able to get a new sandbox spun up. The definitive source for WSCCI code is now this project.

We can haz team

I think there were somewhere around a dozen people in the WSCCI area at the London Sprint, which is awesome. That included people that have been part of the discussion to date as well as people I've never met before, which is even better. After we got the sandbox spun up, several people dug in on various issues to try and convert various pieces of core. Of course, in the process we found all sorts of places where bits of logic didn't actually work, which is great because that's exactly what I was hoping would happen. We fixed at few at the sprint. There are a couple of threads still open as well that need discussion, especially this one. See the issue queue for other places to dive in!

One queue to rule them all

Of course, now that we have a sandbox, what do we do with the existing butler module? We don't want to have to maintain a split code base, certainly.

Instead, we are going to move all development over to the WSCCI sandbox. I will be reassigning existing issues from the Butler queue momentarily. Instead, we will use the Butler module as a D7 backport of the core context libraries. We may not even bring in the unit tests. I'm not sure. Mostly it will just be a wrapper. If you want to help out, head on over to the WSCCI issue queue and see where you can get involved. Contact me directly if you're lost, but please remember to read the existing documentation first. :-)

Next steps

To help keep momentum moving forward, we're going to have our next IRC meeting at 12 pm US Eastern Time on Tuesday 13 September in #Drupal-WSCCI on Freenode. (I'd prefer to have it earlier but I'll be out of town all next week. Again.) I'll post an agenda to this thread when we get closer to that date.

Great work, everyone! Let's keep pressing forward.