The Web Services and Context Core Initiative (WSCCI) aims to transform Drupal from a first-class CMS to a first-class REST server with a first-class CMS on top of it. To do that, we must give Drupal a unified, powerful context system that will support smarter, context- sensitive, easily cacheable block-centric layouts and non-page responses using a robust unified plugin mechanism.
Be sure to read the roadmap overview.
Code can be found in the WSCCI sandbox.
Hot issues
Active issues where we need help:
- Drupal Kernel Patch: This is priority one, based on Symfony2.
- Use Symfony2 session handling: We'll need to improve Symfony2 a bit in the process, too.
- WebSockets: How do we do that in PHP? Or do we?
Key discussions
Important discussions for background:
Recent discussions
API-based content display as a central concept?
In the REST routing discussion, joachim referred to a talk Larry gave where Larry referred to serving up block content via AJAX.
Let's discuss what happens if we take that concept and run with it much more completely.
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WSCCI Scrum Meeting
Sorry for the late announcement. We are having our bi-weekly WSCCI scrum at the usual time (noon US Eastern Time) on Tuesday 11 October. Agenda is mostly continuation of what we started to work on last week. :-) We will meet in IRC in #drupal-wscci as always.
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Services 3.0 has been released
Just wanted to let everyone know here that Services 3.0 has been released.
Read moreThe meaning of nothing
There's been much discussion recently about what NULL means in the context of, er, context. To try and get everyone on the same page, I'm going to try and summarize the problem space with examples to try and generate further discussion. I apologize if this is a bit long. :-) For the sake of argument I'm going to ignore ArrayAccess, as if we end up with an API that's not compatible with it then we will have to drop it anyway.
Consider the case where the request URL is foo/bar?stuff=things
Read moreWSCCI status update - Next meeting 2011-09-27
Important notes for those following the WSCCI initiative!
We've updated the way that we handle traversing of context keys and parent context objects. As of this weekend, the logic is now this:
For a given context key foo:bar:baz, check the top-most context object in order:
foo:bar:baz
foo:bar (argument baz)
foo (arguement bar, baz)
Then check the parent context object, if any, in that order over again, and keep doing it until:
1) We find a value and return it.
2) We run out of context objects to check, and then return NULL.
Meeting notes - 2011-09-13
We had a very productive, very focused meeting earlier today for the WSCCI initiative. There were about a half-dozen or so active participants, plus a few others who were more quiet. No one was around that wanted to talk about the UX thread, so we spend a little over an hour talking about the handling of empty values returned from context handlers and how that affects traversal of the context hierarchy. (I know, really exciting stuff, right?)
The basic problem was that there are four things that a context handler could return:
Read moreEnglish 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).
Read moreResearch on two HTTP libraries
Me and Dave Hall (@skwashd) spent part of our weekends looking through the HTTP request handling code in both the Zend and Symfony frameworks. We may have been little bit biased by the good help from Lukas Smith (@lsmith77) of the Symfony community, but we've tried to be fair in the comparison of the 2 projects. We encourage feedback on our findings.
Assessment Criteria
Read moreWhat's going on in Web Services?
If you haven't been following progress at the http://groups.drupal.org/wscci group and the http://drupal.org/project/issues/butler issue queue, here's what's been going on, and where you can help, as well as an IRC meeting for you to attend to hash this out more!
The initiative is split into 4 phases: Contexts, Plugins, Routing/Services, and SuperBlocks/Panels in Core. The status of these currently is:
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Core Context UX: Page & Component library
Drupal’s site building user experience currently consists of moving between a lot of different tools and interfaces. Within Drupal 8 we want to unify these experiences (blocks, menus, views, panels…) more.
The experience that we are focusing on, is that of creating the front-end of your website - where content, blocks, views, menus are placed on pages and how these can be configured.
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