Services - Looking Forward

Hey all.

So as Scott said I have recently taken over as lead maintainer of Services. I thought I would share some thoughts as to the module's future and open up the floor to discussion. These are my current thoughts but I'm very much open to dicussion, nothing except the first part are really set in stone right now.

My first priority is finally getting a stable release of the 6.x-2.x branch done. You may have noticed a lot more activity in the queue recently. My goal is to close all the open issues for 6.x and then roll a release candidate. Anything which involves an API change I'm putting off at this point - we just have too large an installed user base to be messing with things. Beyond that all the feature requests and bug reports are being evaluated and dealt with. If anyone wants to get involved by all means be my guest. Here's my master list I'm working off of.

http://is.gd/5bRgU

What I would love the most is reviews of some of the pending patches.

After that I'm considering opening a 3.x branch working off of the local fork Hugo Wetterburg has made as outlined at

http://goodold.se/blog/tech/future-services-3x

This is a 100% rearchitecture of Services, but it includes a lot of really cool features including a lot more flexibility in terms of mixing and matching servers/authentication methods. I'd probably look to roll his services_oauth package into the core Services module as well (if he's open to that.) I have yet to dig into his code closely, but it looks extremely promising.

After that the focus is going to move to porting for D7. I'm still pondering the best approach to take here. I have been working off the assumption that D7 would start as a straight port, and we would work rearchitecture and redesign in as we had time. However several people have suggested that the best thing to do is to open the 3.x branch and port from that. This is an appealing notion but I'm worried about the time constraints as we definitely want to meet our responsibilities under D7CX. I welcome any input from the community here.

There has also been some proposals and a patch from Nick Vidal about stripping Services down and taking more of a 'smallcore' approach to it. I'm not in favor of this personally but if anyone wants to make a case for it I'm happy to listen.

So what do you think, bring it on! Either leave a comment or join #drupal-services on IRC. This channel is permanent now so come by anytime and hang.

Thanks all.