Views 2 begun

I've begun work on Views 2.

Due to the fact that all of the systems that Views relies on have undergone massive overhaul, and the API changes I want to do, this had turned out to basically be a ground up rewrite. THis is probably good as it will let me really get rid of some problems that are leftover from how I started this whole thing out, but of course it's going to take some time.

I'm moving toward more object orienting. This means methods. Whereas now we have one function with too many arguments, views_build_view, in Views 2 we're going to have $view->build() and $view->render(). And perhaps $view->execute() to cover both steps in something fairly easy. I've got load/save working with the new schema API. This is kind of a cool piece of code. Also note that by separating build from render, it'll become possible to insert a query, so long as it matches the data that Views is expecting.

Here are the core systems that need to be finished:

o The $view object itself. $view->load() and $view->save(). These are basically done.
o views_get_view (which can get a view from cache, database, and default views). This could also be view::get_view() but I suspect that factory methods are both not terribly appreciated by most around here, and aren't terribly exciting in PHP4 anyhow.
o Load/save Views API info (tables, arguments, defaults, etc) in the views cache. That's pretty much next.
o Put all of the information about views pages into hook_menu (this is an absurdly complicated piece of code these days).

Once those are finished, other work can go in parallel:

o Build a view
o Render a view -- This one's bigger than it sounds like, there's a lot here.
o Edit a view -- I hope this one sounds big. It's bigger than that. =)
o Translate old Views APIs for core into new Views APIs
o Export a view
o Update the theme wizard.
o Update views_rss