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Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2016 12:54:14 -0500
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Attributes/Annotations Case Study: Drupal
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 04/29/2016 11:54 PM, Pierre Joye wrote:
> Hi Larry,
>
> On Apr 30, 2016 6:48 AM, "Larry Garfield" <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:
>> Most of the examples that have been given so far are either trivial
> boolean flags or data validation rules to be evaled.  In practice, very
> little of Drupal's use of annotations in Drupal 8 fit either category.
> Rather, they're used primarily as, in essence, a serialized metadata object
> describing a class, which is used for registering that class and
> potentially others.  I figured I'd give the proposed syntax a try with some
> Drupal examples and see how well it fit.
>
>> Disclaimer: I'm sure someone will pipe up with "your use case is invalid
> because you shouldn't be using annotations that way."
>
> What I would like to say yes. Very very loudly. But I am not sure about
> what is what or what defined what in your complex example
>
> Do you have a link to the source file so I can make an informed reply
> please?

Sure.

The block annotation is defined here:

http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupal/tree/core/lib/Drupal/Core/Block/Annotation/Block.php

And the particular block plugin that I showed is here:

http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupal/tree/core/modules/system/src/Plugin/Block/SystemBrandingBlock.php

The annotation for a content entity is here:

http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupal/tree/core/lib/Drupal/Core/Entity/Annotation/ContentEntityType.php

And the Node class is here:

http://cgit.drupalcode.org/drupal/tree/core/modules/node/src/Entity/Node.php

Note that in both cases I omitted the base class definition and such to 
focus on the annotation. Drupal does make excessive use of inheritance. 
I have been vocal about this problem for some time, but it will take a 
little while for enough people to experience the pain of poor design 
choices for them to get on board with better ones. Nonetheless, an 
annotation system in core should be informed by real-world usage, and 
Drupal is now a very significant real-world usage.

Also note that because Drupal is so heavily configuration driven, many 
many things must be more dynamic and abstracted than they would in any 
bespoke system.  That's why Drupal tends to over-do so many things; it's 
necessary to achieve runtime-configuration-driven data modeling and 
display business logic.

--Larry Garfield