Last month, Boston hosted the 10th annual Design 4 Drupal conference, which highlights Drupal’s role in front-end development, UX, and design. Although Sevaa Group couldn’t attend, we watched from afar as Drupal founder Dries Buytaert gave a keynote about the future of JavaScript in Drupal front-end.
He starts with a surprising fact: It took only 10 days for Netscape employee Brendan Eich to create JavaScript! Despite its importance today, Javascript was considered a program for amateurs in its early stages. JavaScript gained more notoriety with the introduction of Gmail. Now we use JavaScript every day in some of our favorite applications and programs like Google Maps and Twitter.
Next, Dries recounts the history of Drupal, “I started Drupal from my dorm room 18 years ago.” He mentions that at this time, HTML4 was out, CSS was becoming increasingly popular, Javascript was still considered amateur, Google was in its initial stages, and the mobile web and social media didn’t even exist yet. Since its beginning, Drupal has “constantly reinvented itself” and is now extremely accomplished.
Dries then speaks of Drupal 8 and its impacts and goals. In the past year, Drupal 8 sites have increased by 51%. Dries says that the two main focus areas of Drupal 8 are to become easier for content creators and site builders to use and to mark the start of Drupal’s evolution to an API-first platform. “Today, Drupal’s REST support is rich and mature,” Dries says, as he summarizes their support for all entity types, custom REST plugins, and their newest addition, file upload support. Drupal offers services for building decoupled applications, which continues to appeal to more and more organizations including familiar names such as New Balance, The Weather Channel, and Warner Music Group among others.
6 Steps Towards a React UI in Drupal
While Drupal’s administration has not yet embraced a Javascript framework, React gives users the “cutting-edge” experience they need. With this new development, the team begins their quest for innovation in 6 steps:
- Stabilize the JSON API module
- Improve the Javascript testing infrastructure
- Create a design for the administration UI
- Allow contributed modules to use React or Twig
- Implement missing web services APIs
- Make the React API extensible and configurable
Drupal is such a welcoming community, accepting everyone, every skill level, and every chance to grow. With this keynote, Dries proves that Drupal isn’t exclusive, the platform utilizes various techniques and languages. We’ve worked with Drupal a lot since our start in 2001, and we’re equally familiar with JavaScript. Let us know how we can help with your next project.
If you attended Design 4 Drupal (or wish you had, like us), then you’re in luck. DrupalCamp Atlanta is right around the corner! We’re proud to announce our sponsorship, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. If you have something to say, we want to learn! Submit your session today!
