Services Roadmap from Monday's Summit

Thanks to everyone who came to participate in the Summit on IRC Monday morning. We had a really good discussion and I think we settled on a game plan for the next few months

FIRST PRIORITY is getting a stable release of the 2.x branch done. This will involved getting all the big issues in the queue closed, and going through a beta or two. A couple of things that are high priority:

• Getting some consensus on the views.get changes (http://drupal.org/node/654644)
• Getting the doxygen completed throughout (http://drupal.org/node/354242)

The current bug queue can be viewed at http://is.gd/6DDwI. Anyone wanting to get involved right now can jump into the queue, test fixes, and write / review patches. This is the biggest thing anyone can do to help right now!

Once that release is done, I will open up development on the 3.x branch. Many of you have probably seen the blog posts that Hugo Wetterberg has been doing about the branch of Services that he is running for his clients. This new version has some major improvements, including vastly increased flexibility. This code will form the start of the 3.x branch. This also will most likely include an oAuth implementation, by pulling the Services oAuth module into Services core.

For more information on this check out the following links

• Hugo's original blog post outlining his current work.
• Creating a Service with the new version.

I urge anyone interested in the future of Services to start digging into this and providing feedback. The code is all there on github to be pulled down and messed with. NOTE this means a complete overhaul from the current version. There will be no backwards compatibility. The drop is always moving! We will provide an upgrade path from the current branch.

At the same time as that happens we will begin work on the D7 version. After a great deal of discussion it was decided that rather than do a straight conversion of the current branch, we should work off the 3.x code base for Drupal 7. This means we will have a shiny new version of Services to go with the shiny new version of Drupal. This presents two challenges.

1) We only have about three months to do this
2) It will, to some extent have to be developed side by side with the D6 version.

For the time being this development will continue on github. I have really mixed feelings about this, but it does offer some advantages. First and foremost, Hugo is actively developing this code there as a part of his work, and will for the near future be the most active developer. Second it will be much easier to coordinate a lot of large scale changes without having to worry about patches and the queue. When we have something reasonably stable, we'll push it into CVS and then it is back to the queue and patches for everyone. I will note that several other projects, like Views, are also going this route for their D7 versions.

On the plus side, it is looking like the conversion should be reasonably easy. Core Services will be very easy, and many of the individual service implementations should be as well. I'm mostly worried about the node and taxonomy services since those areas have changed so much. Some services will be way simpler, like File service which can now take advantage of the new File API.

Some open questions that came up

1) Do we dump Views implementation? Pro: Forces Services to focus only on core functionality. If people want it it will live in contrib where it will get the attention it needs. Con: Most people will want to use it and thus won't have a real single-download solution.

2) Do we dump XMLRPC as the default implementation and move to REST? Pro: REST is really the future, makes the oAuth implementation meaningful. Con: XMLRPC is in core and dead simple to use.

I'm sure there were more but those leap to mind.

The goal is to have a solid beta of the Drupal 7 version done by Drupalcon, and code sprint our way out the door in SF. I fully expect D7 to be released at Drupalcon and I am currently operating under this assumption as far as timeline.

I think those were the main points. I would like to again thank everyone who came and got involved. There is a small and growing group of regulars hanging out in #drupal-services on IRC on a daily basis if anyone ever has questions or wants to talk about any issues they have. Feel free to come by or comment on this post if you have any questions or concerns about the above.

Thanks and see you in the queues!