Why you Should be Thrilled about Drupal 8?

With over 200 advanced features and developments, the forthcoming release of the world’s foremost open source web content management podium will persuade you.

Drupal 8 will set a novel standard for user-friendliness, while offering numerous ways to customize and set out your content to the Web. Customize data structures, pages and listings effortlessly and take benefit of new abilities for building APIs, and adjust to multilingual requirements. With easier migration process from earlier versions, in-place content editing tools, a leaner and meaner core and loads more power for modules and themes thanks to a modern Object Oriented Programming (OOP) approach on the backend, there is something for one and all to love in Drupal 8.

Drupal is growing with Drupal 8, and shedding some of the clumsiness left over from its earlier years so that it can actually take its place as one of the utmost attainment of modern open-source web technology.

Drupal core is going through a major revision, with the focus on making Drupal more object-oriented so it can use advanced OO best practices and other advances in the PHP universe. The more evident example of this is the addition of different Symfony components into Drupal core, like HttpKernel component for request handling, plus other PHP libraries that deal with precise challenges, like Twig for templating and Assetic for asset management.

Building for the Future

Shedding so-called “Drupalisms” for time-tested object-oriented methods will build up Drupal and make the course of developing great web applications with it better than ever. It may also cause to the expansion of the Drupal community and an inflow of new talent and originality, as developers trained in object oriented methods will have a simpler time learning and using Drupal.

Drupal 8’s object oriented way of generating modules will enable current developers to draft and put up solutions that will be better to those of prior Drupal versions, as it will be simpler for them to power the huge accumulation of design patterns and methods the object-oriented school of thought has formed over the years. It will also make it simpler to incorporate current PHP technology into Drupal, such as core is doing with Symfony.

This is not to say there won’t be challenges. Much of Drupal 8 is a major exit from how developers worked with it in versions 7, 6 and before. Even the most knowledgeable among us now have much to learn and it seems porting to Drupal 8 will be a major rewrite for many modules. Though this presents an important challenge and lots of work ahead, but it is an essential step in modernizing the contributors that makes Drupal great. The modules, their users and authors, and Drupal itself will be enhanced for the experience.

This was a general take on Drupal 8. Now we will see some interesting technical points.

Dependency Injection

Firstly, Drupal in version 8 is adopting an object-oriented best practice called dependency injection. Basically, DI engages passing an object to the resources it needs to work rather than making it liable for handling its own resources. For instance, you may have an object that needed reading in data from a data source, like the filesystem. Rather than having the object produce a case of a file-reading object to use, you can pass that object in when building it. That way, your object is simpler in that it doesn’t have to manage the formation of the file-reader.

The huge win with DI is that it makes polymorphism simpler. If you afterward decide that you want your object to read from a database instead of the file system, you can just pass it a database-reading object instead, given that it has been the same techniques as the one that read from the filesystem. Then your object can read from a database, a file, or anything else without bothering where the data is coming from.

Methods like this enable us to write much more maintainable, modular code, and Drupal 8 adopts DI broadly, as well as interfaces. It even deals with the problem of handling large webs of dependencies by taking in Symfony’s DI management system, which allows simple arrangement via YAML files. The flexibility and modularity offered by this system will probably make it possible to override and extend more of Drupal’s default behavior than ever before.

Plugins for Reusable Code

Many other advances involve the changes in Drupal 8. Reusable components of code can be built with plugins and plugin managers, things like field widgets, blocks, and field formatters. Plugins will employ annotations in place of hooks for endorsing their services to Drupal. Annotations is a concept borrowed from Java, contain structured docblock comments that are parsable by the Doctrine library.

At first, the notion of including metadata via pseudo-code in comments was one way of getting around the lack of native annotation support in PHP. But the use of annotations rather than a static class method permits Drupal to recover a class’s metadata without requiring loading it into memory.

Configuration Moved Into Files

Many configuration data are moving into YAML files, offering the benefit if version controlled settings formerly supplied by the Features module. Developing on Drupal 7’s entity concept, 8 has Config Entities, objects that signify at runtime the stored configuration. This will develop the way we store and work with views, fields, and many other Drupal components. Organizing Drupal 8 with interfaces and classes makes it more lightweight, as classes can be loaded only when required by means of an autoloader. This will make Drupal a superior backend for JavaScript based web applications and REST-based APIs. The usage of PHP 5’s latest namespace feature will make it simpler to organize code.

Composer for Third Party Libraries

The last item to be mentioned about Drupal 8 is its use of Composer. Composer, like Node.js’s NPM, makes it effortless to download third-party PHP libraries into your project, in addition to storing a configuration of which libraries and library versions it depends on via a json file. Its adoption is a big win for Drupal, mainly as the number of libraries accessible via Composer keeps on to growing. The main composer repository, Packagist.org, was hosting 10,000 libraries since April. With Composer, Drupal developers can simply find and add existing solutions and focus on new challenges rather than reinventing the wheel.

So that’s a summary of appealing technologies that contribute to the awesomeness of Drupal 8.

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