"You just close your eyes and hit enter." -- Dries Buytaert
There are some moments in history you know you'll look back on and remember. Drupal 6 is a great product, but SOOO much effort is going into making Drupal 7 the best it can be that I was very stoked to be present at the first commit of our new branch maintainer, Angie "Webchick" Byron. The patch happens to be the tests for our new database engine that's all based on php's PDO and it will give us a lot of extra flexibility with other flavors of sql and even database systems like Oracle.
This of course brings me to my next point which is that the testing framework in Drupal 7 is the coolest freaking thing I've had the chance to play with in a long long time. It's nice because with all this updating of existing core systems to work with the new database layer, we can make our updates, and then run our tests, and if everything continues to work properly, then we have some very good feedback, that very quickly that tells us we've done it correctly. This has helped increase the certainty of our patches very significantly, and has also given us all a measuring stick we can use together. Of course, it's not perfect and we do still need to review commits line by line to make sure we're doing a manual sanity check, but this eliminates the need to even review a patch if it DOESN'T pass the tests for the associated work. I've had the pleasure of working on the new blog.module for Drupal 7 and while there are no massive leaps and jumps just yet, it is worth noting that the new PDO database layer for D7 is very interesting, and fun to use. I'm still awaiting the commit that will allow me to kill the db_rewrite_sql calls in the module, but at least I have a good working idea of what it is that will be required on an ongoing basis for module development into the 7+ release cycles of Drupal. Good stuff.
I leave for Oklahoma City on Thursday morning local Budapest time. It's been nice to have a little extra time on either end of the convention to catch up on sleep and to just soak in the sites and culture of Hungary. However, I'm pretty well home sick at this point. I'm ready to see my cat, and I'm ready to sleep on my bed. Hungary's been great, but there's no place like home.
