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
Drupal 8 Web Services Funding Proposal
Introduction
There was a meeting last week between Crell, the Palantir team, webchick, and chrisstrahl to discuss the prospect of funding the WSCCI initiative. This meeting resulted in a funding proposal to resource this initiative through the Large Scale Drupal program and the Drupal community. This page and the attached documents are the results of the discussion. If you're interested in getting involved, please, contact me and I'll fill you in with further details of how to get involved.
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WSCCI update and call for help
A brief status update and call for participation for WSCCI!
There are a couple of lines of work we're working on right now. Most could use additional hands.
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D8 UX Analysis – The IA Space Hypothesis
An ongoing difficulty in design discussions is finding reliable/agreeable words to describe or identify key concepts. Whatever label we choose for an idea may have different connotations for different people. The term ‘Information Architecture Space’ (or ‘IA Space’) is certainly subject to varied interpretations so I want to take some time here to describe what I’m referring to more fully.
Read moreD8 UX Analysis: Design Assumptions and Principles
The architectural changes underway for Drupal 8 via WSCCI and related activities present UX designers with the non-trivial task of working out a new approach to Drupal administrative and content management tasks. UX design is a complex matter under any circumstances but when the technological ground is shifting dramatically under the feet of the designers then it is all the more challenging. Here are some brain exercises to help us limber up for the task!
Read moreD8 UX Analysis – Layouts, IA Spaces and the Principle of Definition-Usage Pairs
One of the key ideas behind the new D8 architecture is that of resources being identified by unique URLs. It sounds simple enough but, behind it, I think there are some exciting potentials for transforming Drupal’s UX strategy. I want to share some ideas about that kind of transformation here and I’ll tackle it from a few angles: ‘what is a page’; the principle of definition-usage pairs; and IA Space and URL semantics.
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Resources, representations, URIs, and WSCCI routing
There've been some interesting discussions happening recently (as well as not so recently) about how the Web Services initiative (formerly known as WSCCI) should best implement the underlying plumbing for making Drupal 8 properly RESTful. In this post, I want to clarify my current understanding of where we landed in today's #drupal-wscci IRC meeting. Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on the intricacies of HTTP, REST, and related architectures, so what I explain here might be incorrect, in which case, please say so.
Let's start with some quotes:
Read moreWSCCI Post-DrupalCon Status Meeting 2012-03-27
Yep, meeting time again. Same bat time, same bat channel (#drupal-wscci). We'll be discussing the events in Denver and what our next steps are.
If you want to help out, we now have a list of tasks that need teeth sunk into them!
Read moreWSCCI Routing in Denver
Update: Implementation has started.
Wow, that was an awesome DrupalCon! Kudos to the Denver team for a job well done.
As far as WSCCI is concerned, the most notable events actually happened just before and just after the conference. On Monday, several people met at the offices of Examiner.com, including Symfony lead Fabien Potencier. The topic on the table was the new routing system, which previously had not been sorted out. It was actually a very productive sprint, and we came to a conclusion far more easily than I expected. :-) The conversation also continued at the Friday Sprint, mostly with Lukas Smith, another leading Symfony developer and one of the people working on Symfony CMF.
Rather than go through all of the details of the discussion, I am going to go straight to the planned approach and its background. I think that will be easier to follow than a blow-by-blow. If you want the stream-of-consciousness notes (transcribed primarily by the amazing webchick) are also available but be warned that they lack context in many many places.
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Superglobal use in core (and Symfony alternatives)
Below is a list of superglobals used in 8.x core and what facilities are present for accessing the same information via the Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request object. If more than one facility is available, options are listed in order of specificity/recommendation/preference. If I overlooked any uses of superglobals in core, please let me know. This list does not include superglobals used in scripts/*.
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Plugins System for Core
We've been quiet about it and it is no longer technically under the umbrella of any of the initiatives but I've posted a patch containing most of the work done on plugins to the core issue queue to start discussing the steps to getting it committed. Follow it here: http://drupal.org/node/1497366
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