In this discussion, Alexander Varwijk, a Technical Architect at OpenSocial and gaming enthusiast, teams up with Martin Anderson-Clutz, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Aquia and Drupal module maintainer. They dive into the fascinating world of the Revolt Event Loop, exploring its importance for Drupal's core and improvements in managing asynchronous tasks. Topics include the impact on cron jobs, tackling test instability, and how event loops can enhance performance, especially for long-running processes. Plus, they introduce the IEF Complex Widget Dialog for more efficient content creation!
The Revolt Event Loop enables Drupal to efficiently manage asynchronous tasks, improving performance by allowing multiple operations to run concurrently.
The IEF Complex Widget Dialogue module enhances user experience in Drupal by facilitating complex data entry through dialog boxes for inline entity forms.
Integrating Revolt with PHP fibers helps Drupal transition to asynchronous programming without extensive code rewrites, simplifying development for concurrent operations.
Deep dives
Understanding the Revolt Event Loop
The Revolt Event Loop addresses the synchronous nature of PHP applications that process tasks sequentially. It allows developers to manage asynchronous tasks more efficiently by providing a mechanism to schedule these tasks and execute others while waiting for responses. For instance, when making multiple API calls, instead of waiting for each to complete before starting the next, the event loop can handle multiple calls simultaneously, optimizing performance. This is especially useful in scenarios where certain tasks, like data fetching, may involve waiting for responses from external services.
Introduction to the Module of the Week: IEF Complex Widget Dialogue
The IEF Complex Widget Dialogue module enhances the use of inline entity forms by enabling them to open in dialogue boxes, improving user experience during complex data entry tasks. This module, actively maintained with recent updates, supports various entities, allowing content creators to edit, duplicate, or delete entries easily without navigating away from their current page. It also accommodates specialized handling for different entities such as users and taxonomy terms, thereby streamlining workflows for content management in complex environments. By integrating this module, Drupal users can create a smoother and more efficient content creation process.
The Role of Fibers in Asynchronous PHP
Fibers, introduced in PHP 8, allow applications to execute asynchronous tasks while maintaining a synchronous coding structure, which is crucial for developers transitioning to asynchronous programming. By utilizing fibers, Drupal can handle concurrent operations without the need for extensive rewrites to existing code, thus easing the learning curve for developers. The combination of fibers with the Revolt Event Loop enables Drupal to efficiently manage multiple tasks that require waiting for external I/O operations, like database queries or API requests. This leads to better performance and responsiveness in web applications, as developers can focus on their logic rather than the complexities of asynchronous programming.
Potential Impact on Drupal's Future and Contributed Modules
Implementing the Revolt Event Loop opens up opportunities for Drupal to expand its capabilities beyond traditional web requests, potentially facilitating long-running applications like chat servers or real-time data processing systems. This could lead to improved performance for various contributed modules, especially those that need to perform frequent, parallel data operations, such as re-indexing in search or batch processing in cron tasks. The event loop's ability to handle multiple asynchronous requests simultaneously can significantly enhance user experiences and application efficiency. Additionally, leveraging the existing PHP ecosystem, developers can easily integrate libraries that utilize asynchronous functionalities into their Drupal projects.
Long-Term Goals: Moving Beyond Cron
In the long term, the goal is to evolve Drupal's architecture to potentially eliminate the need for traditional cron jobs by adopting a more dynamic event-driven approach. By enabling asynchronous processing, Drupal could handle background tasks in real-time, avoiding delays associated with scheduled cron runs. This might involve setting up long-running processes that listen for tasks and execute them when conditions are optimal, rather than adhering to fixed schedules. Such a shift could revolutionize how Drupal manages routine operations, improving overall efficiency while giving developers greater flexibility in application design.
Today we are talking about the revolt event Loop, what it is, and why it matters with guest Alexander Varwijk. We’ll also cover IEF Complex Widget Dialog as our module of the week.
How old: created in Mar 2020 by dataweb, though recent releases are by Chris Lai (chrisck), a fellow Canadian
Versions available: 2.1.1 and 2.2.2, the latter or which is compatible Drupal 8.8 or newer, all the way up to Drupal 11
Maintainership
Actively maintained, latest release in the past month
Number of open issues: 4 open issues, none of which are bugs against the current version
Usage stats:
273 sites
Module features and usage
When you install the module, your Inline Entity Form widget configuration will have a new checkbox, to “Enable Popup for IEF”
Includes specialized handling for different kinds of entities, like nodes, users, taxonomy terms, and users
Will handle not just the creation forms, but editing entities, and also duplicating or deleting entities
Not something you would always need, but can be very useful if the form you want to use for entity or even parent forms that are complex
I should also add that IEF supports form modes, so often I’ll create an “embedded” form mode that exposes fewer elements, for example hiding the fields for URL alias, sticky, and so on. So I would start there, but if the content creation experience still feels complex, then IEF Complex Widget Dialog might be a nice way to help
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