Proposed Sessions

Managing the crowd: Designing distributed systems

Damien Tournoud — Tue, 28 May 2013 18:51:15 +0000

Some people, when confronted with a scalability problem, think "I know, I'll deploy a cluster of servers." Now they have multiple problems.

Websites are becoming both increasingly transactional and increasingly distributed. Many different servers and systems can be at play in powering today's content-, community- and commerce-heavy websites.

With this increased decentralization comes multiple problems that we cannot ignore. Networks have a tendency of being unreliable (especially in cloud infrastructures), the latency between components is non-trivial, servers can fail in multiple different ways, among other commonly overlooked problems.

All the components we are using in the web stack (from the low-level infrastructure all the way up to Drupal) attempt to deal with some of those problems at their level. Some succeed better than others.

This session will provide a framework for understanding the hard problems at play in distributed systems, so that the advantages and limits of each tool can be more easily understood.

We will attempt to bridge the gap between recent (and not-so-recent) research in distributed computing and the web community. We will talk about concurrency control, scalability, fault tolerance, consensus protocols, synchronization... without taboo, but always in a way that is understandable without a degree in Computer Science*.

*that the speaker doesn't have, anyway

Schedule Information

Track:

DevOps

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Speaker(s):

Damien Tournoud

Drupal 8 for Site Builders

swentel — Tue, 28 May 2013 20:06:22 +0000

Click here to watch Drupal 8 for Site Builders.

Dries’ dream to eliminate the programmer comes closer with every new major release of Drupal. While we are not there yet, Drupal 8 has become more powerful and flexible out of the box for site builders.

In this talk, we will cover the major new or improved tools and features that are available for site builders in Drupal 8, such as:

Views in core;
New configurable fields e.g. entity reference, date, e-mail and others;
Multilingual changes;
Blocks & Layouts;
Responsive images and breakpoints;
and much, much more...

Creating a site has just become easier for everyone.

Schedule Information

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Time slot:

Tuesday · 10:45-:11:45

Room:

Panorama Hall · Wunderkraut

Speaker(s):

swentel

Leveraging 12 Years of PHPUnit

sebastian_bergmann — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:48:28 +0000

Click here to watch Leveraging 12 Years of PHPUnit.

Automated testing is a cornerstone of delivering agile, robust, quality solutions. The introduction of SimpleTest to the Drupal 7 release cycle had a huge impact on the core Drupal developers’ ability to rapidly iterate while minimising regressions. Drupal 8 fully embraced test-driven development, and now boasts over 50,000 test assertions. As we look towards Drupal 9, it is an ideal time to take stock of how we got there, and what we can do even better this time around.

As part of Drupal’s evolving integration into the wider web development community, it’s useful to learn what we can from other projects. Sebastian Bergmann is the creator of PHPUnit, the de-facto standard for unit testing in the PHP world. He brings a wealth of experience in implementing PHPUnit in open source communities and commercial products.

This session will cover:

how PHPUnit is used in different communities and projects, and what’s been learnt along the way;
what’s new and state of the art in unit testing, and how PHPUnit is integrating state-of-the-art paradigms;
how PHPUnit compares to other testing technologies and methodologies.

Schedule Information

Track:

Coding + Development

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Time slot:

Thursday · 14:15-15:15

Room:

Panorama Hall · Wunderkraut

Speaker(s):

sebastian_bergmann

DevOps and Drupal in a large organisation: What we learned

jtopper — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:50:14 +0000

Click here to watch DevOps and Drupal in a large organisation: What we learned.

We’ve all read the glowing success stories about how wide-eyed internet startups have built their technology platform on a foundation of good DevOps practice, but what about the rest of us? How can a large, traditional media company, 60 years in the making, apply the same tools and techniques to their existing infrastructure?

We’ll discover how one such organisation introduced a DevOps capability to support the Continuous Delivery of a high traffic, multisite Drupal installation, collaborated on by several large teams, on a brand new Linux platform. In this honest, real-world account, you’ll learn what we did badly as well as what we did well.

Schedule Information

Track:

DevOps

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Time slot:

Tuesday · 15:45-16:45

Room:

Panorama Hall · Wunderkraut

Speaker(s):

jtopper

From Not-Invented-Here to Proudly-Found-Elsewhere: A Drupal 8 Story

alexpott — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:51:55 +0000

Click here to watch From Not-Invented-Here to Proudly-Found-Elsewhere: A Drupal 8 Story.

Drupal has always been an amazingly flexible, programmable, adaptable platform. The aspect-oriented hook system has been a great ally to developers on some of the biggest websites in the world, allowing for enormous flexibility.

But, Drupal has always done things it’s own way - in some cases, to the exclusion of best practices elsewhere. Drupal 8 broke this pattern, and began to leverage code from outside its borders.

Drupal 8 integrates much code from outside its ecosystem. Most notable of all, of course, is the replacement of Drupal’s core HTTP routing component with Symfony’s HTTP Foundation classes, but there are many more: Doctrine, Guzzle, Twig, Assetic, EasyRDF, and more - all bound together with leading technologies from the PHP community, PSR-0 and Composer.

Drupal’s enormous talent pool has been made even larger - and we are contributing back to other projects. We’ve truly become members of the wider PHP community.

Join Alex Pott, the newest Drupal core maintainer, to hear the story of how this shift was made, its pain points, and to examine the opportunity it presents.

Schedule Information

Track:

Coding + Development

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Time slot:

Tuesday · 13:00-14:00

Room:

Congress Hall · Acquia

Speaker(s):

alexpott

Commerce Without Borders

bojanz — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:54:09 +0000

Click here to watch Commerce Without Borders.

The next big thing for Drupal is eCommerce. Drupal is well prepared to meet that challenge, with Drupal Commerce, a flexible framework developed from the ground up on Drupal 7, relying on powerful modules such as Views as Rules. On top of Drupal Commerce sits Commerce Kickstart, the most popular Drupal distribution, built specifically for eCommerce.

In this talk we will build a store aimed at the worldwide market, taking into account a wide range of problems and considerations.

Topics covered:

What Commerce Kickstart is, what it offers, and how it can help you get a basic store up and running very quickly.
Translating the store interface, content and products.
Working with multiple currencies.
Choosing the right payment provider.
Taxes, and how they can vary based on where the store and the customer are located.
Discounts, and how they fit with taxes.

The community has been hard at work for several years, identifying the difficult problems faced by merchants and their developers, gathering knowledge and developing solutions.
Learn how their efforts are allowing us to think bigger, address new markets, and solve new problems. And start getting excited, because Commerce without borders means Drupal without borders!

Schedule Information

Track:

Site Building

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Time slot:

Thursday · 10:45-11:45

Room:

Panorama Hall · Wunderkraut

Speaker(s):

bojanz

Are GPL and Patents Limits or Opportunities to Grow Business?

msvalima — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:55:31 +0000

Click here to watch Are GPL and Patents Limits or Opportunities to Grow Business?.

This talk is about the two most important intellectual property (IP) topics with open source: the GPL license and software patents. They are often seen as complete opposites, and many hold strong opinions about them. GPL is a cancer! Kill all patents! This talk gets us back to the basics: what is the state of GPL and patents today, and how do they affect software based businesses including everyone making their living in the Drupal community. It is very true GPL makes it difficult to create scalable software licensing business. At the same time GPL can help make a platform truly popular and you can innovate around its business limitations. Third party software patents can make you feel uncertain to add a certain feature. At the same time patent threats are rarely any problem for smaller companies. When you are ready, filing and licensing patents can give you an edge against competition and actually get your business to the next level.

Schedule Information

Track:

Business + Strategy

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Time slot:

Tuesday · 10:45-:11:45

Room:

North Hall · Exove

Speaker(s):

msvalima

Results-Only Web Investments

solipsist — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 15:56:39 +0000

Click here to watch Results-Only Web Investments.

Building websites has gone from a technical service to one that serves to solve well-defined business problems. Gone are the days when everyone had to have a website only because it was expected. Today customers pay for a reason and for end results. Problem is, most web shops keep selling technical solutions to match feature-oriented requirements, never taking results or business goals, into consideration. As a result, shops are relegated to being specialist subcontractors and it results in projects rarely generating the kind of impact that is expected.

The shift to focusing on results is necessary to beat this trend of failed expectations. Turning from requirements-driven web development to result-only web investments generating tangible benefits may seem like a big leap, but brings advantages to both buyers and sellers. It fosters a culture of unified teamwork across all parties and takes away many of the causes for seller–buyer distrust.

In this talk I will show you how to take the step from focusing on requirements to talking results with your customers and increasing your customer satisfaction and team happiness at the same time.

Schedule Information

Track:

Business + Strategy

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Beginner

Time slot:

Thursday · 13:00-14:00

Room:

Meeting Hall 1 · Commerce Guys

Speaker(s):

solipsist

Evolving frontend development; dancing on the tip of a hurtling rocket

jessebeach — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 16:53:05 +0000

Click here to watch Evolving frontend development; dancing on the tip of a hurtling rocket.

Front end development is a fickle, fickle game. Tools, best practice and standards shift like memes in a feed. Even in the 6 years since the introduction of the iPhone we've seen progressive enhancement, responsive design, version-less browsers, HTML5, JavaScript frameworks, native mobile applications, 4G speeds, and staggering mobile web access increases just to name a few things. When work opened on Drupal 7 only hints of this future existed. Here we are again, on the cusp of another major Drupal release staring into our crystal balls trying to predict the nature of front end development for the next five years.

Out of the box, Drupal 7 produced HTML. From a default Drupal 8 installation, we can now request JSON in addition to HTML. With this fundamental shift in the basic architecture of Drupal, we have the potential to power dynamic front end applications with it. But we may not get all the necessary tools from a default Drupal 8 installation. For instance, the entity CRUD API will be incomplete. Contrib module developers will find themselves filling in the gaps. The future will arrive and its distribution will be uneven.

In this session we will discuss how Drupal is shifting to support complex front end architectures. Specifically,

Decoupling front end templates from back end data sources using a framework such as Backbone.js
Balancing the dynamism of single page applications with addressable, RESTful content management
What the functionality gaps of Drupal 8 might be concerning modern web app development
How we use tools like Drupal to keep pace with the racing evolution of modern front end practice

Drupal is many solutions to many problems. It is difficult to know where your particular solutions are hidden within its numerous features. Together we'll identify those pieces that front end developers need, we'll unravel their mystery and then we'll get to writing the code that we love.

Schedule Information

Track:

Frontend

Featured:

Featured

Experience level:

Intermediate

Time slot:

Tuesday · 14:15-15:15

Room:

Congress Hall · Acquia

Speaker(s):

jessebeach

Multilingual site tools in Drupal 8

Gábor Hojtsy — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:31:09 +0000

Click here to watch Multilingual site tools in Drupal 8.

Drupal 8 aims to provide a familiar environment yet it has many fundamental underlying changes in terms of how it understands language on your site. There are new features for single foreign language sites and multilingual sites alike.

This session will cover changes and improvements around installation, the language settings system, content language and translation support, software translation and configuration language and translation.

The ideal attendee at this session has some experience in Drupal 6 or 7 multilingual site building and want to get the scoop on what is possible in Drupal 8 core (and a key contributed module or two if needed). Those who have no experience in foreign/multilingual site building will also get a lot out of it.

Schedule Information

Track:

Site Building

Experience level:

Intermediate

Time slot:

Tuesday · 13:00-14:00

Room:

North Hall · Exove

Speaker(s):

Gábor Hojtsy