Drupal Camp Austin

Drupal Camp Austin 2011 (gist)


Drupal Camp Austin 2011 - 11/19/2011

Responsive design

  • mediaqueri.es
  • Progressive CSS
  • Feature detection (JS - modernize)
  • front-end reverse proxy ignorance
  • polyfill... JS shim that makes ie work
  • mediaquery polyfills
    • respond.JS
    • adaptjs
  • Responsive modules
    • respondjs
    • responsive_images
    • responder
  • script loaders
    • modernizer
    • yepnope
    • labjs
  • themes
    • adaptivetheme
    • omega
  • responsive video: fitvidjs
  • front end performance
    • ~97% perceived response time is front
  • Responsive images, datauri, ...
  • jdrop.org
  • Stevesounders.com/mobileperf
  • Blaze.io/mobile

Practical Performance Tuning

miscellaneous

  • psr0 module (may not be autoload compatible)
  • Composer (package management)
  • drush make version package injection and drupal modules
  • worker queue - drupal queue with drush in long running mode to pick up jobs (worker pool) - use reddis for queue (in place of beanstalkd for reporting and queryability)

Pantheon (David Strauss)

  • Moved to Chef Solo, no more Bcfg2
  • Nginx + PHP-FPM
  • Cassandra? based file system for public/private files (distributed + redundant)
    • Valhalla?
    • Probably going to move to S3 or Rackspace analog for cheaper rates (redundancy on instance storage is very expensive $1/GB x 3)
  • SASL API communication
  • Hidden Jenkins job runner
  • Running Fedora, primarily for system.d.

Examiner

  • use mongodb for storage (no MySQL - motivated by trying to avoid cacheing)
  • mongodb writes are a bear... they have run out of indexes and are in constant tuning mode for performance
  • interesting scale problem with 1000x usage spikes - autoscale is difficult
  • use hadoop for (batched) "live jobs" that need to compute complex royalty rules

Code Smell (Larry Garfield)

  • and (ie object_validate_and_save) *
    • drupal_get_form (retrieve, populate a form0
    • Solr::addDocuments wraps _documentToXML private method, so you can’t see the object XML without adding to the index.
    • God objects - classes that do too much
  • parameters or returns of multiple types
    • throw exceptions
    • return object or FALSE
    • _registry_check_code() -> constants, strings, variable types
      • Volunteer to cleanup this function
  • Overly complex code leads to overly complex bugs.
    • comment_node_view !!!
  • Run-time type identification
    • Changing keys by object type = bad
    • Polymorphism (procedural)
      • callback
      • messy
    • Polymorphism (OO)
      • method, clear
  • 4 Unit Testing (263)
    • SimpleTest in core are not unit tests unless 1 Drupal = unit
      • This is system testing and is valuable, but not unit testing.
    • DrupalUnitTestCase (~25)
      • We should be doing more of this, but...
      • Globals, hooks, etc don’t handle it well
      • If you can’t unit test your code, your code is wrong.
    • Avoid globals, avoid statics
    • Dependency injection, construct objects with what they need, don’t call other API midstream.
    • Minimize singletons, another form a global. Hard function calls are a form of singleton.
  • 5 Documentation
    • If you can’t document, you don’t know what you are doing.
    • If you don’t document, another wont know what you are doing.
    • Bad documentation:
      • string $jail -> what is jail, what is valid, must define
      • array $settings -> what goes in settings?
    • Why things aren’t documented
    • Lazy -> bad
    • Indifference -> bad
    • Lack of comprehension
      • That’s OK, document that! (Here be dragons)
    • Embarrassment
      • That’s OK, document it! Very useful.
    • What to document
      • Every function
      • Every method
      • Every class
      • Every object property
      • Every constant
      • Every parameter
    • drupal.org/node/1354
  • 6 Inappropriate intamacy

    • coupling
      • content coupling
      • Common
      • External
      • Control
      • Data-structured
      • ?
      • ?
    • Otherwise difficult to refactor
    • Solutions
      • Well documented interfaces
    • 7 Purity
    • Pure functions always returns the same value given the same input.
    • Side effects
      • Changes global state, cannot be repeated, etc.
    • Sometimes side effects are the goal
      • ie save() -> that’s fine, but isolate save()
    • drupal_theme_initialize()
      • Lot’s of side effects
      • cleaner approach
      • class Theme -> more testable
    • 8 Good smells
    • Single purpose
    • Self-contained
    • Predictable
    • Repeatable
    • Unit testable
    • Documented
  • aphorisims-api-design

  • coding horror -> code smells

  • java -> SmellsToRefactoings

  • joel spoelsky -> Wrong.html

  • signs you should not be coding

  • TheDailyWTF.com

    • Good code
    • Queue
    • DBTNG (biased)
    • File transfer for module update
    • PHP Object patterns and practice, it’s a bit old
    • Sitepoint book coming soon.
    • Avoid older PHP tutorials

Project mgmt (from the Examiner)

  • PERT - from military - provides more insight than gantry
  • Focus on stakeholder needs rather than wants
  • last 3 mo. Finally unhacked core
  • a bad decision is better than indecision on a deadline
  • a bad client is better than no client at all
  • process and schedules: client should be just as accountable
  • communication, mediate and translate, unblock -- calm from chaos
  • minimize little shiny distractions -- context switching kills!
  • manhole cover round and heavy - keep it from falling in and stop from easily walking away - for saftey

Drupal Commerce

  • ecommerce framework - flexibility about what you can build with it
  • eurocentres
  • opendealsapp.com
  • inline product form... in rsyzmar sandbox
  • Ajax framework in d7 is really impressive with commerce
  • zondervan??
  • realmilkcheese.com

Profiling with Xhprof

  • http://msonnabaum.github.com/xhprof-presentation/#1
  • brianmercer ppa
  • Module implements should go into pressflow - David Strauss... follow up.
  • XHProf should run in production on a few requests...
  • Helps to have non-file backend on multi-node setup.
  • msonnabaum/XHProfLib
  • Strongarm patch to fix variable cache performance issue

Devops bof

  • git flow
  • gitalyte?
  • git tags? Are they locked and never supposed to change?
  • drush make idea: [patch][104065] = ...
  • Jenkins: DB backup, Dev to stage to prod jobs
  • etc keeper - package commit hooks -
  • backups and restore scripts -- testable in Jenkins
  • update hook - reads from text file
  • devel generate - integrations
  • default content module - phase2.... will be.dropped
  • queued Node access rebuild
  • updatedb - revert features in hook_update
  • drush deploy (like cap deploy) - video in London
  • git reference cache
  • camptocamp -- puppet conf -- apache2
  • Vewee_fun - stevenmerill
  • fastly
  • tungsten?? MySQL