On 13-May-06, at 5:51 AM, Dries Buytaert wrote:
On 13 May 2006, at 00:17, Bèr Kessels wrote:
Serious: What Drupal needs above all, is not some "Higher Language To Talk To Lower Languages", but a way to make stuff easier.
IMveryHO forms api surpassed its goal in this: What is easier: calling form_weight() or building an object-from-drupal-specific-arrays? Point is clear.
I agree. While Drupal becomes more powerful, it also becomes more difficult to develop for.
Drupal 4.7's new forms API is a prime example. It is obviously great in terms of security and flexibility, but at the same time, it is also _much_ harder to use than the old form API. What does that mean? Well, that some people can make really fancy forms but that the majority of the people will find it more difficult to make basic forms.
I kinda disagree here - I find the keyed array's *much* easier to read and figure out how that's gonna translate... perhaps you were the one guy who could remember the function parameter order of the old "API"?
This is somewhat problematic as we need more people that are good Drupal developers. There is such a strong demand for good Drupal developers, yet which each new version, we add more barriers as a side effect of making Drupal more powerful. As a result, we'll get many more users, but relatively fewer developers. And that's a big problem.
this I agree with.
For most of us eliminating the various SQL schemas makes perfect sense. After all, most of us are expert Drupal developers, and as such, an incremental improvement is easy enough to deal with. However, for new Drupal developers, who are not intimate with Drupal's code, this just increases the barrier.
Why did you end up with Drupal to begin with? Because it had an extremely powerful API for every single problem? Or because it was clean code, easy to get into and make work?
I thought the project lead was cute.
The web is built by millions of individuals, many of which are amateurs. They continuously update, tweak and rebuild their websites. We want Drupal to remain accessible for them.
We do, absolutely. I don't think the proposed extensions are terribly complex ... and they *do* make it easier to read. If i can define my table /once/ and be reasonably assured that that definition is gonna magically work across DB platforms, that sounds much easier to read to me. Furthermore, if there is a bug on one of the platforms, it is more likely due to an incorrect translation in the DB layer, than my just never using system *foo* and not realizing it's SQL syntax variance.
Hence, the challenge is to make Drupal more powerful _AND_ easier to develop for. This requires that we question certain development directions and look at them through the eyes of amateurs.
http://buytaert.net/complexity-is-a-disease http://buytaert.net/why-php-and-not-java
yup, which is why we don't do crap like XML definitions for tables... but something very simple and straightforward - that, however, gains us something very real. my $0.02 (and i haven't read this whole thread yet... so I may well be repeating others). -- James Walker :: http://walkah.net/ :: xmpp:walkah@walkah.net