Annotated plugins, and other D8-style techniques in Drupal 7

Drupal 7 is no longer an excuse to write old-fashioned PHP.

I am going to describe a number of techniques that allow a module developer to apply the best practices from Drupal 8 and modern PHP to a Drupal 7 module.

The session will cover most or all of these topics, depending how much time is left:

• Organize your code in classes with PSR-4, using xautoload.
• Use a one-off dependency injection container, good enough for a single module.
• A preview on the d8plugin module, which allows D8-style plugins in Drupal 7, using annotations. E.g. formatters and text filters can be created as plugins, instead of using procedural hooks. I hope that this module will be ready to use on the day of the Drupal camp.
• A brief look at Composer manager for external dependencies.
• Unit-test many of your components with PHPUnit, totally bypassing or mocking out Drupal.

Note: This is the first time I am giving this session, and I have not prepared anything yet. It covers at least one topic that depends on ongoing development. We will see how it goes.