Talking Drupal #474 - Revolt Event Loop

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.

For show notes visit:
https://www.talkingDrupal.com/474

Topics

• What is an event loop
• Why does Drupal need an event loop
• What will change in core to implement this
• What problem does this solve
• Does this make Cron cleaner and long running processes faster
• What impact will this have on contrib
• How would contrib use this loop
• What does this mean for database compatibility
• What inspired this change
• Test instability
• Why Revolt
• Will this help with Drupal AI

Resources

• Adopt the Revolt event loop for async task orchestration
• revoltphp/event-loop was added as a dependency to Drupal Core
• Add "EventLoop::run" to Drupal Core
• Migrate BigPipe and the Renderer code that's currently built with fibers
• Revolt Playground that shows converting some Fiber implementations from Drupal to the Event Loop
• DrupalCon Barcelona Talk about "Why Async Drupal a Big Deal Is"
• Async PHP libraries
  • https://reactphp.org/
  • https://amphp.org/

Guests

Alexander Varwijk - alexandervarwijk.com Kingdutch

Hosts

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan
John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi
Joshua "Josh" Mitchell - joshuami.com joshuami

MOTW

Correspondent

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to use Inline Entity Forms but have the dependent form open in a dialog? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • IEF Complex Widget Dialog
• Brief history
  • 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