Click to watch "Web Services and Symfony Core Initiative"

Problem

The web of tomorrow isn't a series of linked pages. It's a series of linked resources, some of which happen to be HTML pages. Even then, often a "page" won't exist as a single thing but be built up dynamically using Ajax, AHAH, ESI, and other modern techniques. Web servers won't respond to HTML requests, they'll respond to HTML, SVG, PDF, JSON, XML, Atom, and more. HTML is just another web service. Drupal is not suited to that world.

In order to make it suited to that world, the WSCCI initiative is rebuilding Drupal's internal routing and request handling around the Symfony2 framework. The knock-on effects are enormous, as we switch from page callbacks that return strings that we put blocks around to controller objects that return response objects, which may or may not be HTML. This touches on nearly every part of Drupal, and Drupal 8 will be a radical and welcome departure from what came before.

We're in the home stretch, and time is of the essence. This session will cover the current status of the initiative and how you (yes, you, right there, sitting in that chair, I mean you!) are needed to help drive it home.

Goal

The end goal is a Drupal that is built around the concept of request/response, not globals/HTML string. Such a Drupal is object-oriented, dependency-injected, and unit testable. Such a Drupal is also built largely on the Symfony2 Component library, which is all of those things already.

Proposed Solution

Drupal TNG is already under-way, but needs help. This session will focus on what work remains to be done, prioritizing tasks, and sorting out the remaining knock-on effects. We have much to do and less time to do it in.

Slides here, including links for where you can help out: http://www.garfieldtech.com/presentations/dcmunich2012-wscci/