DX

I spent about a week of my time at Acquia on improving Drupal 8’s REST support.

That time was spent fixing, reviewing, triaging and documenting.

Drupal 8’s REST works very well, we just have to make it more friendly & helpful, remove Drupalisms and support more REST capabilities.

Fixing, reviewing & triaging

I went through the entire issue queues of rest.module, serialization.module and hal.module. I was able to mark about a dozen bug reports as duplicates, fix a dozen or so support requests, have reviewed probably a few dozen patches, rerolled about a dozen patches, created at least another dozen patches and … triaged 100% of the open issues. I clarified titles of >30 issues.

I’m working on making Drupal 8 faster as part of my job at Acquia. The focus has been on render caching¹², which implies that cacheability metadata is of vital importance in Drupal 8.

To be able to render cache all things that can possibly be render cached, Drupal 8 code must:

• set the right cache max-age — to ensure only the cacheable parts of the page are cached
• set the right cache contexts — to ensure content is varied as expected (per language, per role, per timezone, per user …)
• set the right cache tags — to ensure rendered content is invalidated when the data it depends on is modified

Before Drupal 8, approximately zero attention was given to cacheability of the rendered content: everything seen on a Drupal 7 page is rendered dynamically, with only the occasional exception.

By flipping that around, we make developers more conscious about the output they’re generating, and how much time it takes to generate that output. This in turn allows Drupal 8 to automatically apply powerful performance optimizations, such as: