It's now day 2 of the Open Source CMS Summit and the conference is going great guns. There's a general hum around the conference and great ideas are getting thrown around.
Strangely, the best session today for me was not Drupal-related -- it was the smalltalk session on Seaside. I'd read about smalltalk's continuations before but had never seen them demonstrated. Avi Bryant gave a demo that had jaws on the floor as he dynamically changed his (~8 lines of code) shopping cart demo while it was running. Unfortunately, Drupal is firmly anchored in the mediocre world of PHP, and that shows no signs of changing. But that doesn't mean we can't take some of the ideas, where the language allows us.
Adrian Rossouw, Earl Miles, Jeff Robbins and I had a great conversation over dinner about how actions, forms API, and web services can integrate. The theory is that actions take parameters as input, and one way to get those parameters is to fill out a form. So a browser can drive the action, but an XML-RPC call could, too. New tonight was the realization that automatically exposing subsets of actions as macros to end users who have the proper permissions solves much of the problem that we currently solve with a PHP filter, only more securely.
As I've said to several people today, what makes Drupal fun for me is a combination of working on problems and solving them in the best way possible and being surrounded by people who are smarter than I am. That stretches me, just like approaching a problem from a completely different paradigm (e.g., the smalltalk demo) stretches me.
