Web services

Up with which I will not PUT

Larry — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 03:35:38 +0000

Up with which I will not PUT

For Drupal 8, we want to bake REST support directly into the core system. It's unclear if we'll be able to go full-on hypermedia by the time we ship, but it should be possible to add via contributed modules. For the base system, though, we want to at least follow REST/HTTP semantics properly.

One area we have questions about is PUT, in particular the details of its idempotence requirements. For that reason, I'm reaching out to the Interwebs to see what the consensus is. Details below.

Larry 17 October 2012 - 10:35pm

Drupal in the post-page era

Larry — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 07:31:21 +0000

Drupal in the post-page era

(At BADCamp, several people were asking me to explain what the heck the Web Services core initiative was trying to do, so I got to practice my elevator pitch. This is essentially that pitch in written form.)

Drupal today is very page-oriented. Every request that comes in is responded to with a full HTML page. It is possible to return something else, and finally in Drupal 7 there is, sort of, native support to do so with delivery callbacks, but by and large any non-page response is an after thought at best and a hack at worst. The entire system is built around the assumption that we're returning an HTML page. Why else would we still load the theme system and form system for an auto-complete callback?

In the past, that hasn't been a major issue. The web was a series of pages, in practice, and Drupal is one of if not the most flexible page-generating machine on the web today. Drupal 7 is, arguably, the pinnacle of this page-oriented world.

Just in time for that world to be fading fast.

Larry 1 November 2011 - 2:31am

Announcing the Web Services and Context Core Initiative

Larry — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:37:10 +0000

Announcing the Web Services and Context Core Initiative

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).

Larry 11 April 2011 - 11:37am