Thinking Drupal 8 and beyond.

I'd like to share some of my thoughts and long-term visions for Drupal 8 and beyond:

1. Full CRUD for the Entity API

In the long-term I want to see the Entity API becoming our main CRUD-API, on which modules may build upon. For D8 I do think for every entity should be based upon a class implementing the "EntityInterface", which provides some simple methods to easily access identifiers, revision ids, labels, uris as well as save(), delete(), .. methods.

2. Improved DX for fields

Now, we have two kind of entity properties: Fields and non-fields. So should one use an entity property or a field? We have some nice APIs around fields, but they are not built for daily developer usage so programmatically re-using fields is no fun. Still, developers can go without a field for any custom data storage, but then we are loosing all the advantages fields come with - like flexible storage or the awesome module support (which I've tried to solve in D7 via hook_entity_property_info()). Once we have improved DX for fields in place, developers can easily embrace it and benefit from its advantages.

3. Everything is a field

So why not adopt fields for any entity property? So we could make entity properties easily translatable via the field API and benefit from the improved out-of-the-box module integration and stuff already written for fields, like widgets and formatters . Of course, some fields need to be hidden from the UI then.

4. Storage APIs

With everything being a field, entity data would be scattered around in lots of db tables. Also, it should be possible to use the API to register any remote data object as entity. So we need to have entity-storage and field-storage backends, such that also the remote-data-entity can have fields stored in the local database. Thus, with everything being a field we need to allow developers to delegate field-storage to the entity.

5. Describing data

Also, as of now field types have to describe the db schema to be used for saving. However, the schema API is built for the database system so it has no notion of describing stuff beyond it, like that a timestamp is a date. So maybe the contract between the storage API and the field system should not be the db schema, but an actual description of the data to be saved. I.e. instead of telling the system to save an integer which will be used for saving a node id, tell it that it has to save a reference to a node. Apart from that, the described data structure is what other APIs built around fields (widgets, formatters) have to use (or should use -> query), just as any developer working with fields. So simultaneously, modules making use of entities and their fields could rely on that information, e.g. to determine all entity references or just to get some data values of a certain type, e.g. textual values for token replacements.

6. Profile2 in core

With 1) in place, it should be rather easy to replace our old profile module with something new built upon entities and fields like profile2. We'll see how profile2 does for d7.

7. Rules in core

I'd really like to work on bringing a slightly simplified version of the foundational API of rules into core, thus re-placing the current action system. However with Rules 2.x the whole API is built around the way of describing data utilized for hook_entity_property_info() as well as on entities. Thus for Rules in core making sense, it would need something comparable in core - e.g. point 5).