Decision Maker

Varnish Cache is a web accelerator, also known as a caching reverse proxy or a HTTP accelerator.

This talk focuses on what Varnish does, how Varnish achieves its performance levels, its architecture and future development. Experiences from applying Varnish to varnish-cache.org (a trac site) and varnish-software.com (Drupal 6 Pressflow) is presented.

RRDtool is an established way to log time series data. The algorithm compresses the data to allow you to store it efficiently and averages data to achieve this.

RRDtool is the back-end of many well-known tools such as Cacti, munin, or mrtg, that will be well-known to anybody who has managed a website.

The RRDtool Drupal module was developed by Jeremy Andrews and Gerhard Killesreiter of Tag1 Consulting to allow using RRDtool for measurements that are known by Drupal only and can not be measured externally, such as the invocation of specific hooks.

Selenium is a testing framework which allows anyone - developers, designers, project managers or the client - to record user journeys in their browser and have those user journeys be replayable on anyone else's browser. It also supports whole suites of tests, automating in the browser and automating outside the browser using a dedicated testing server.

Selenium's a great choice for Drupal testing because so much of the functionality you or your client will want to build is browser-based. Also, with a few extra tweaks, Drupal can integrate very nicely with Selenium to produce robust tests.

Drupal lends itself well to modular, separately deployable code. This means you can often reduce quite large Drupal-based projects to sets of minimum deployable features (MDFs) - informally speaking, chunks of functionality which get a particular job done, and don't look weird on their own - which quickly start to take shape as Drupal development plans.

Dries Buytaert will give his bi-annual State of Drupal talk in the beginning of DrupalCon Copenhagen, where he’ll discuss where Drupal is and where it is going. In particular, he’ll discuss the final preparations for the release of Drupal 7, the Drupal.org redesign, and some of the initial plans for Drupal 8.