Grabbing Hanuman's Long Tail – Jacob Singh online

Okay, so that’s going a bit too far. But we’re getting ever closer to the dream module and theme updates and installs using a GUI in your browser!

Many thanks to cwgordon, Joshua Rogers, dww and especially chx for kicking some serious arse on this issue and getting us very close.

That’s right, in Drupal 7 you will be able to update your modules and themes without learning FTP, SSH or CVS.

Check out my latest screencast

and get involved.

Also PLEASE vote for my session at DrupalCon Paris.

In my last post, I showed how updating modules may look in Drupal 7. If you didn’t see it it is here

In this post, I’m going to throw up some “dream” wireframes which may or may not make the ver 1 cut, but are perhaps good start in the right direction.

Hopefully, at least parts of them will be practical to implement, or at least spur discussion.

Without further ado:

Check out the clickable wireframes

And give feedback here:
Plugin Manager in Core: Part 3 (integration with installation system)

The problem: Updates in Drupal require FTP / SSH and a bit of know how

When the average Drupal site owner without ssh, cvs and other geek gadgets wants to update modules on or themes on their Drupal site, they currently have to do the following:

1. Go update status and see the mod is out of date
2. Take the site offline
3. Make a backup (if they can)
4. Know where to find the module on d.o., download the tarball
5. Unzip the tarball
6. Remove the current directory
7. Use FTP to upload the new directory
8. Run update.php

We’re trying to provide a way that users can get the same user friendliness of a package manager like Synaptic. Where updates and new installs are just a few clicks, no geek gadget belt.

I’ve entered the D7 ux fray, specifically focusing my generous amount of Acquia community time on getting a project called the Plugin Manager spruced up and into core.

For more background on the effort, see: Plugin Manager in Core (part 1).

The solution: make Drupal update like everything else.

Here is the issue:
Plugin Manager Part 2 : The update status UI

I’ve been working out some wireframes of how the process might look, and I wanted to share them with the planet to see what people thought of them. So without further ado:

Check out the clickable wireframes

Round 2

Hey, stay out of my index!

So when I first joined Acquia, my fledgling Solr hosting service had IP based security. You, the customer could tell me what IPs you were going to connect with, and I would allow access to your search index from those IPs.

One of the first major tasks was to implement HMAC based authentication to the service to ensure against man-in-the-middle attacks and provide a way to use from any IP. Also, it is standard operating procedure for other Acquia services.

Fail first!

In the first iteration, we built something on the load balancers (which run nginx) because it provided a central point of access control, the balancers were under-utilized and we didn’t have to mess with the Solr code.

This worked okay for awhile, and was decently fast but was quite flaky as some stupid developer had the brilliant idea to implement it as python middleware with fcgi (flup). That developer was me.

Don’t fail second!

So to combat the unstable nature of the fcgi protocol, and to make things a little more efficient, I (along with help from Peter Wolanin and Douglas Hubler) rebuilt it in Java using a Servlet Filter. This was a royal pain the butt, as Java is pretty tricky when it comes to input streams and buffers.

Thankfully the results are worth it:

It’s hard to tell from this graph because of the peak, but the median stayed almost the same (blue line), and the average decreases pretty significantly (purple) as does the 90% line (yellow). Click the image to see it larger.

This graph shows the standard deviation (blue) in addition to the previous numbers and describes more acutely what the previous graph suggests, that is, the previous implementation was not any slower really, but less consistent, causing some of the requests to take much longer than others.

So there you have, Acquia Search is both secure and fast and now 200% more reliably fast