We humans are naturally selfish creatures. Perhaps it's just me, but I think that the nature of this selfishness changes over time. As children, we are obsessed with owning or possessing things: our entire lives revolve around having toys, having food, having entertainment. But as we get older, we seem to become less concerned with having things, and more concerned with doing things. This strikes me as a fascinating change, and also as one of the key transitions between childhood and adulthood.
The Summer of Code has finally come to an end, and it's time for me to write up my final thoughts on my involvement in it. The Import / Export API module has been a long and challenging project, but it's also been great fun and has, in my opinion, been a worthwhile cause to devote my time to. My mentor has given my work the final tick of approval (which is great!), and I personally feel that the project has been an overwhelming success.
Evangelism. For centuries, many of the world's largest and most influential religions have practiced it. The idea behind evangelism is that one particular religion is the one true way to find G-d and to live a good life. It is therefore a duty, and an act of kindness, for the followers of that religion to "spread the word", and to help all of humanity to "see the light". I say to all evangelists: stop shining that accursed light in my face!
In a small, poorly ventilated room, somewhere in Australia, there are four geeky fingers and two geeky thumbs, and they are attached to two geeky hands. All of the fingers and all of the thumbs are racing haphazardly across a black keyboard, trying to churn out PHP; but mostly they're just tapping repeatedly, and angrily, on the 'backspace' key. A pair of eyes squint tiredly at the LCD monitor before them, trying to discern whether the miniscule black dot that they perceive is a speck of dirt, or yet another pixel that has gone to pixel heaven.
The Summer of Code is now past its half-way mark. For some reason, I passed the mid-term evaluation, and I'm still here. The API is getting ever closer to meeting its success criteria, although not as close as I'd hoped for it to be by this point. A very crude XML import and export is now possible, but the ID and reference handling system - which is set to be one of the API's killer features - is only half-complete at present. Unfortunately, it's going to stay that way for a while, because I'm away on vacation for the next full week.
It is said that a house is the sum of its parts. If you take away the doors, the windows, the roof, the floorboads, the inside walls, the power lines, and the water pipes, is it still a house? In developing Drupal Lite, I hope to have answered this question in relation to Drupal. What are the absolute essentials, without which Drupal simply cannot be called Drupal? If you remove nodes, users, and the entire database system from Drupal, is it still Drupal?
The mid-program mentor evaluation (a.k.a. crunch time) for the Summer of Code is almost here, and as such, I've been working round-the-clock to get my project looking as presentable as possible. The Import / Export API module has made significant progress since my last report, but there's still plenty of work left to be done.
For many years, a certain scene from a certain movie has troubled me deeply. In The Matrix (1999), there is a scene where the character 'Neo' is killed. Stone dead, no heartbeat for over thirty seconds, multiple bulletholes through chest. And then he comes back to life. Up until now, my friends and I have always derided this scene as being 'fake' and 'medically impossible'. But like Neo, I believe that I may finally have the answer.
It's been almost two weeks since the 2006 Summer of Code began, and with it, my work to develop an import / export API module for Drupal. In case you missed it, my work is being documented on this wiki. My latest code is now also available as a project on drupal.org. Since I've barely started, I think that this is a stupid time to sit back and reflect on what I've done so far. But I'm doing it anyway.
Every time that you perform any action in a desktop application, you can hit the trusty 'undo' button, to un-wreak any havoc that you may have just wreaked. One of the biggest shortcomings of web applications in general, is that they lack this crucial usability (and arguably security) feature. However, implementing an 'undo' (and 'redo') system in Drupal should be a relatively simple task - much simpler, in fact, than you might at first think.