As this is the first in my update report series, it will contain a look at the past and try to explain things to people who are not so familiar with Drupal.

Tl;dr: for the first time, right now it seems the dream of running Drupal 8 on MongoDB only is totally attainable.

Over the years the security teams consistently shut down projects that were updating modules from Drupal. In Drupal 7, we added a subsystem where you could FTP or SSH back to the server to do that -- and allowed for local writes in insecure setups. In Drupal 8, however, we now have a feature in core that allows us to write PHP files just like that. I feel the community deserves an explanation of why we didn't allow these modules in the past and what is different in the D8 API.

In the name of full disclosure, as I have mentioned in a previous post, I am paid by 10gen to make Drupal more MongoDB friendly. This does not just mean the contrib modules (mongodb and efq_views) but core work as well. Our goal is to make Drupal 8 work with just MongoDB, without any SQL. It just so happens that the cornerstones for this are things the community wants anyways: the configuration management initative happens to remove a lot of reliance during the boot process -- no system table, no date_format* tables, no variable table.

In Chapter 1 I have deliberately not mentioned where the dependency injection container gets built because I knew it'll change. The new hotness is the existence of Bundles. Roughly, what Drupal provides in modules (a package of related code and functionality), is a bundle for Symfony. Bundles expose their contents through the dependency injection container and subscribe to events. All the kernel functionality described in chapter 1 is now added in the CoreBundle class. Modules can have their own bundles, too.

Dries in a comment says that the priorities of Drupal core are "content editors over site builders over designers over developers over theoretical purity." On the other hand, the majority of Drupal core developers, including yours truly here, know it much much better what developers need than content editors or site builders or designers. Acquia is doing Spark so I think content editing is covered. But, we need core developers who are passionate about site builder and designer experience.

So I got some update tests fail as we upgrade to Symfony 2.1. The failures were coming from update_parse_xml complaining about malformed XML. I have quickly found a drupal_http_request in the calling function and dumped the URLs it tried to fetch into a file. The test apparently calls a page provided by the update_test.module.

This is not documentation. This is literally the 30000ft high (I have written it on a Calgary-London flight) overview about Drupal 8 page flow as it stands on July 28, 2012. This doesn't mean it will be fully valid even a week later. Also, I am not writing out all the namespaces for classes, it's not necessary.

Two weeks ago I posted two brain teasers about extending ReflectionClass. Let's see the results -- after the break so people not having fun with them yet can.

Progress on what? Glad you asked... let's first go through a few important concepts:

Entity

If you have ever tried EFQ Views and it didn't work you might've thought it does not worth filing an issue because it was abandoned. It is no longer. Please file an issue telling me how it didn't work. Thanks.