Kevin Bridges

Today was an amazing day in Paris. It's hard to imagine without the pictures, but we all gathered on the first floor of the facility that hosted yesterday's Drupal Camp. A good portion of yesterday was planning and thinking leaving today for massive amounts of hacking and coding. Charlie Gordon, Jimmy Berry, Roel De Meester, Erik Stielstra, Rok Žlender, Károly Négyesi, Miglius Alaburda, Dries Buytaert, Douglas Hubler, myself and our gracious host Ori Pekelman of AF83 gathered for more than 10 hours to solidify the framework that will help lead Drupal to it's next Killer Release.

Primary amongst todays developments was http://drupal.org/cvs?commit=111813 which brought a framework for functional tests to core. This is the culmination of "Three years, one month and twenty four days" according to Károly who also had this to say before he started dancing in his seat:
(12:24:52 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:54 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:54 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
(12:24:55 PM) chx: YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
During the discussions following the commit it was pointed out that much of the effort has been a direct result of the organizations that seem to be constantly there in support of what Drupal is and where it is going. Companies like pingVision, Now Public, AF83, Rain City Studios and Google have made work like this possible for us to all enjoy. In particular, if it were not for the results from GSoC and GHoP Drupal simply would not have the testing framework it now does.

I'm sure that each of the participants will be blogging about their accomplishments in the upcoming days so I will leave each of them to fill in the gaps. Most of my work centered directly around getting a full automated testing system in place for testing.drupal.org as outlined at http://drupal.org/node/239542. The benefit of these type of sprints are immeasurable ... simply being able to ask a person on the other side of the table an answer, show them a problem, and talk about a solution is something you can not put a price on. We accomplished a lot but many questions, decisions and work remain.

For those willing to help with improving the test framework, here are some next steps and issues to resolve:
- How to best approach unit tests and mock functions?
- How to test drupal_mail() and drupal_http_request()?
- How to improve the admin UI so we have a nice progress bar?
- How best to do code coverage?
- See http://groups.drupal.org/node/10099 for more ...

My laptop battery is telling me it is time to end this post. My focus is getting back to Colorado and working to help others understand the framework and what needs to be accomplished in the near future. We have a framework but we do not have 100% code coverage. It is going to take an army to finish what has been begun and we are going to have to be organized to complete the work in front of us.