What am I doing in London?

Submitted by Larry on 6 May 2011 - 2:15pm

Session submissions are open for DrupalCon London, in case you hadn't heard. But what should we be talking about?

Once again, I'm going to solicit ideas from the community (that means you).

Naturally my main work these days is the Web Services and Context Core Initiative for Drupal 8. However, that probably won't be main-track session material by London, and I am already slated to present an update on that front as part of London's Core Conversations track.

In recent years, I've been developing an ongoing "Architecture Series" at DrupalCons. My intent is to help Drupalers around the world raise the bar in terms of software architecture and design. So far, I've covered:

  1. DC: Objectifying Drupal
  2. Paris: Design Patterns of Drupal
  3. San Francisco: Objectifying PHP
  4. Drupal: The Next Generation
  5. Chicago: Aphorisms of API Design

What's the next chapter? Honestly I'm not entirely sure. So I put the question out to you, Drupal, what do you want to hear about in the world of software architecture? (Or anything else for that matter.)

Matt Farina (not verified)

6 May 2011 - 7:02pm

There are some questions around butler / the web servies initiative. Do a session that sells me on how this is going to be awesome.

Matt, I just said above that's already going to be a Core Conversation session, not main track. :-)

I don't know at the moment if there will be enough new code/APIs out of it in core that are stable enough to talk about by then. I hope so, but I do not know if I can commit to it. Especially when large parts of it I won't be writing myself (I hope).

Hi Larry,

Sadly I coud not look at the Paris and DC video's so I'm not sure if my suggestion has been adressed in earlier talks. Could you make a link to the video's directly?

I would love to see you go to much more detail about concrete design patterns, which once are we not yet using in Drupal, but should we be using, etc?

btw, your announcement made me finally write a blog about some tests I did with the DB-abstraction layer, what I mean with concrete patterns is a bit illustrated there. I would like to know of which creational patterns the DB-abstraction layer is actually using, is it the Builder or is it another one? why choosing one pattern over the other, etc.

If all this is already done or is too trivial, how about discussing on a new paradigma based on the Drupal designing experience :p

Mixel

p.s. login needed for older drupalcons wtf?

Design patterns was covered fairly well in my Paris talk, which was then also recycled in the first issue of Drupal Watchdog. They were also covered somewhat in DC, with a different spin.

I don't know that something as high level as design paradigms would go over well with the largely non-academic audience at a DrupalCon. I did already blog about it extensively, though. :-)

Sadly the archived DrupalCon sites are not always well-archived. The ones that need a password are offline because they have not been updated for security patches in a while. killes wants them archived to static sites, but so far no one has stepped forward to do so. Volunteers welcome. Videos are usually somewhere on archive.org, but that site is so horrifically organized I can't always find them myself.

Hello,
In your excellent session at Chicago, you somehow concluded that a good API should support 3 uses cases : tests, drush commands and a user interface. As for me writing tests is the most difficult step amongst these three, I would love a session about how to write tests : not about the API of the SimpleTest Framework, but the logic and architecture of writing tests, knowing what should be tested. "Aphorisms of Test Driven Development" would fit here :)

Since Drupal 7 is more (but helas not entirely) OO oriented.
Maybe you could do another OO session in London, explaining how to use D7's OO capabilities to their best?

Just suggesting because that's what I am missing!