Earlier tonight, I was commenting on a friend's blog. He was asking about web game programming, and the challenges of Flash vs. Java. For whatever reason, the first thing that came to mind was OpenLaszlo, which some fellow Drupal colleagues have been very big on lately, so I left a quick note to that effect despite, to be honest, not knowing much about the subject.

Wait, colleagues? It took me a moment to realize that I had indeed just written "colleagues", because I've never actually worked with the people in question.

Drupal 7 is shaping up to be the most modern Drupal ever! (Now there's a silly title if I ever heard one...) Not only are we upping the system requirements to PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0, but PostgreSQL users will now need PostgreSQL 8.1 at least.

Recently I've been talking up various ideas for pluggable subsystems in Drupal in IRC and the other usual haunts. Ideas have been percolating in my head, but so far I have been remiss in actually writing them down. Yesterday, however, I had an epiphany to solve the primary issue I was trying to work out, so I present a hopefully workable RFC (for real, not IETF version) for pluggable subsystems in Drupal.

I am posting this over to Planet PHP as well to invite commentary from those who aren't already embedded in the Drupal mindset. :-)

I have been running Mollom as my spam-fighter on this site for not quite two months now. It's been fairly effective overall. The nifty flash meter shows me just how bad the spam problem is (good grief, 593 blocked spam messages just on 15 May!), and I haven't gotten any spam in my comment list yet.

That is, until today, when a new form appeared.

At DrupalCon Sunnyvale 2007, Rasmus Lerdorf chided Drupal on spending over half of its request time on just the bootstrap process. As a GHOP Task , Cornil did a performance analysis of Drupal and found its two largest performance drains were the bootstrap process and the theming layer. Quite simply, Drupal spends too much time including code.

Drupal 6 has the beginnings of a solution. Page handlers, the most unused code in Drupal, can now be split out into conditional include files and the menu system is able to conditionally load just the file it needs for a given page request. Based on earlier benchmarks, just that code shuffling netted Drupal 6 a 20% performance boost. The downside, however, is that it does require the module author to explicitly specify file to be included, and the syntax for it is just a little bit annoying what with the file name and file path being separate keys on the menu handler.

Fortunately, Drupal 7's self-learning code registry system has just landed, which should obliterate most of the wasted bootstrap cost.

For those who haven't noticed yet, the latest in a expected long line of Drupal books for this year has been published: David Mercer's verbosely-named "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6". It is not a book for the experienced Drupaler; it's target market is people picking up Drupal, and the web for that matter, for the very first time.

Personally I think David has done a great job with it, but then I am biased; I was the tech reviewer for the book. :-) If you want an unbiased opinion, pick up a copy yourself and give it a read. Then you'll know how good it is. As an added bonus, 5% of all sales through Packt's web site are donated to the Drupal Association. Everybody wins!