Any time a given Drupal core development cycle is more than six months old, people start asking "When will Drupal X be released?" The answer, of course, is always "When it's ready. Please help us finish it." That's well and good, and I don't propose that we change that position. Volunteer labor and fixed release calendars do not mesh well.

However, knowing when Drupal will come out, at least in a vague sense, is increasingly important for core developers. The web is changing rapidly, even more rapidly than it has in the past, and knowing what the web will look like around when Drupal 8 is released is critical. Not only so that we can target the right features to get ahead of the curve, but so that we even know what our available tools are.

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:

If you haven't been living under a rock, you know that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile. This is a generally bad thing, as we already have far too much consolidation in the wireless carrier market as is, but that doesn't mean it's not still likely to happen. The only blocker is approval from the FCC, who is, per policy, soliciting public feedback. (It's 11-65.)

I would encourage everyone to sign in and voice their opposition. More carrier consolidation is not what we need. I've included my own public comments below for reference. Feel free to borrow liberally.

At DrupalCon Chicago, Dries announced that the development process for Drupal 8 would be a bit different. Rather than a vast dog pile of efforts to improve Drupal in ways big and small, Drupal 8 will feature a number of major "core initiatives". These initiatives highlight major areas of work that represent not just a patch or three but major changes to Drupal's plumbing. Each initiative will have one or two initiative leads who have the ability to coordinate and make decisions relating to that initiative while working closely with Dries. In a large sense, it is a way for Dries to scale; Rather than Dries having to keep track of 1000 ongoing conversations himself, initiative owners can coordinate related changes while Dries coordinates the initiative owners. It also gives a clear indication of what work is happening and what to expect out of Drupal 8.

The first initiative for Drupal 8 has already been announced; Greg Dunlap will be leading the charge to overhaul Drupal's configuration system to provide more robust, performant, and deployable configuration and change management. That will be critical for Drupal's future as we push further into the corporate and enterprise sphere, as well as enabling more robust and unified configuration handling in the first place.

Today, I am pleased to announce Drupal's second core initiative: The Web Services and Context Core Initiative (WSCCI).

Drupal's CVS repository was pronounced dead this Thursday 24 February at 6:08 pm US Eastern Time. Cause of death was reported acute age combined with an inability to properly merge. CVS is survived by approximately 7000 Drupal projects and a new farm of Git repositories.

Pay It Forward was a 2000 romantic drama featuring Kevin Spacey, Haley Joel Osment, and Helen Hunt. Decently well-received, I found it a good, heart-warming, thought-provoking movie.

It is also an allegory for how open source works.

I've spoken a great deal recently about architectural priorities. In short, we as software developers cannot eat our cake and have it too. Improving flexibility in one area may hurt performance, while improving usability one another area may hinder flexibility. These trade-offs are not necessarily right or wrong, except in the context of the goals and purpose of the project with respect to its target audience.

But what is Drupal's target audience, and how does that impact our architectural decisions?

DrupalCon Copenhagen was a watershed event in terms of understanding how to conceptualize that question, in my view, based on conversations I had with the likes of Mark Boulton, Jen Simmons, and Sam Boyer. In his (excellent) keynote, Jeremy Keith noted that the HTML5 Working Group had a specific, defined set of priorities:

In case of conflict, consider users over authors over implementers over specifiers over theoretical purity.

That may be a good priority order; it may be bad. That depends on your point of view and your goals. It lays out the order in which different stakeholders should be listened to, and if you come to a decision where you have to screw one group over to benefit another how that decision should be made. Having such a clear understanding of your constituent priority is critical to making good, consistent architectural decisions.

So what are Drupal's priorities?

As if on cue, the public vs. private debate has sprung up again within Drupal. The timing is fitting given my last blog post on programming language paradigms. Of course, property visibility is not a new debate, and the PHP community debates this subject from time to time (sometimes humorously).

What I believe is usually missing from these discussions, and what I hope to offer here, is a broader picture view of the underlying assumptions that lead to different conclusions about when different visibility is appropriate (if ever).

In short: It's the difference between procedural-think and object-think.

This article is also available in Serbo-Croatian

This article is also available in Dutch

There has been much discussion of late in Drupal about Object-Oriented Programming. That's not really surprising, given that Drupal 7 is the first version that has really tried to use objects in any meaningful way (vis, as something other than arrays that pass strangely). However, too much of the discussion has boiled down to "OMG objects are inflexible so they're evil!" vs. "OMG objects are cool, yay!" Both positions are harmfully naive.

It is important for us to take a step back and examine why one particular programming paradigm is useful, and to do that we must understand what we mean by "useful".

Programming paradigms, like software architecture, have trade-offs. In fact, many of the same methods for comparing architectural designs apply just as well to language design. To do that, though, we need to take a step back and look at more than just PHP-style objects.

Warning: Hard-core computer science action follows. If you're a coder, I recommend getting a cup of $beverage before continuing, as it could take a bit to digest although I've tried to simplify it as much as possible. There's fairly little Drupal-specific stuff here so hopefully it should be useful to any PHP developer.