TYPO3 Phoenix and FLOW3 - March 2012

Categories: Development Created by Karsten Dambekalns
March turned out to be a rather slow month when it comes to Phoenix. Mostly due to customer projects and issues like private lifes, the Phoenix team members could work very little on the project, while Robert and me still had our hands and brains deep inside FLOW3.
TYPO3 Phoenix
A major achievement was the merge of the refactored TypoScript implementation that was <link http: skurfuerst.github.com t3board12renderingpresentation>presented first during T3BOARD12. Markus worked further on DynaTree for the page tree replacement and nodes can also be deleted and created again. Aske and Bastian worked on the setup tool together. Rens finished the documentation toolchain work and we are now ready to render documentation for Phoenix.
In the management department we decided to try <link http: jira.phoenix.typo3.org:8080>Jira for the next two Phoenix sprints to see if it provides a better overview and handling of issues than Redmine (the base of Forge) does. So far it feels very good and provides a really polished user experience - but we'll continue to evaluate it as planned. Kudos to the server admin team for settings up DNS for us really quick, which enabled us to apply for the Atlassian Open Source license.
FLOW3
One of the main issues we tackled in March was development speed in FLOW3 - one of the major complaints we received so far was the slow proxy building if all caches were empty. To make things worse, the slowness worsened fast with security policies in place and high memory consumption during the compile phase was another rleated issue. A code sprint week brought Andreas and Christian to Lübeck, one day we all travelled to Kiel to meet up with Christopher as well. The results of optimizing the policy parsing, proxy building and reflection service were impressive and brought compile times down to around 2 seconds for people that would have to wait 20 to 30 seconds before - at the same time cutting down memory consumption to (not by) 25 per cent. So, we seem to be on track with our notion of speed being a feature that can be added later - in this case speed will be included in FLOW3 1.1. Some more numbers are included in <link http: www.slideshare.net robertlemke flow3-experience-2012-keynote>these slides.
Another result of the code sprint were full mailboxes for some people - Christian went through 132% of the issues in our various bug trackers and caused a huge wave of notification mails to inform people of updated and resolved issues.
Bastian worked on the backporter and the viewhelper tests for Fluid and also gave the XSD generator some needed care. Speaking about backporting, there were numerous discussions about a workflow to better keep FLOW3 and Extbase in sync with each other and <link http: forge.typo3.org projects typo3v4-mvc wiki extbase__flow3_issue_workflow>a suggestion was made that everyone is happy with for now.
Aske cleaned up some parts of the authentication classes and extracted common functionality into abstract classes. Custom authentication mechanisms can now be implemeted a lot easier than before, <link https: review.typo3.org c classes security authentication token typo3orgssotoken.php>as can be seen here.
Robert focused on the HTTP foundation and related refactorings, patch sets and reviews followed each other continuously and the result is expected to land in master before T3DD12. While mostly invisible from the outside those changes massively clean up the MVC stack and raise the code coverage of unit and functional tests.
The Form Builder and API for FLOW3 already mentioned last month <link record:tt_news:1031>were released along with an example package and full documentation. So if you need to build forms with and for FLOW3, watch the <link http: www.youtube.com>introductory video and read <link http: flow3.typo3.org documentation guides forms.html>the documentation.
For those not on the bleeding edge of FLOW3 development we released another maintenance release, <link http: flow3.typo3.org documentation guide partv changelogs>version 1.0.4. Among some smaller issues it fixes a potential <link http: typo3.org teams security security-bulletins flow3 flow3-sa-2012-001>security issue caused by unserializing a user-supplied string. No exploit is known yet and the first to find one is still <link https: twitter.com kdambekalns status>eligible for a free beer…
The highlight end of March was definitely the first FLOW3 conference ever, the FLOW3 Experience 2012. Organized by TechDivision and held in Kolbermoor near Rosenheim (somewhat) near Munich it was a really nice event and will definitely come back as an international event in 2013. About 170 attendees made their way to Bavaria, one even from as far as India. The website holds the <link http: www.flow3experience.de media>slides, videos and a bunch of pictures and reports for those who missed it.
The End
That's it for March. Now on with April… stay tuned!