The session was presented by a team of CCK developers. In the light of announcements in Dries’ Keynote yesterday, in which he talked about how fields will become first-class citizens of Drupal and the importance of nodes will be affected, the future of CCK raises a lot of interest. This is partly because CCK is the de-facto standard implementation of fields functionality in Drupal, right now.
The first half of the session was devoted to discussions regarding new data-model. There are several approaches under consideration, but from the perspective of code-simplicity, a-table-per-field (roughly) approach seems to be winning the votes.
Second half of the session was more controversial and had to do with Dries’ vision for the future of Drupal – content aggregation. The main new initiative is code-named Local Fields of Remote Data. The gist of the problem is: how do we “harvest” a remote data-source without physically bringing-in the remote content and duplicating data in a local database as Drupal nodes?
The problem is valid; has no working solution yet and is quite challenging, indeed. Honestly, I am quite skeptical that a full-fledged problem can even be solved. There are some parts of it that can be improved upon, however.
For instance, the abstraction where the source of a field can be a remote data-source (implemented by the field itself), not necessarily a local MySQL database, is probably possible and useful. This is where most of the effort of the working group is concentrated, right now.
The development team seems to be avoiding the questions of caching and performance, at this stage, considering it “out of scope” and a problem of a field implementer. This is arguable. A unified infrastructure for caching and basics of remoting seems necessary part of a solution. Everybody implementing their own hack could create a big mess in the long run.
In any case, all the discussions about the future of the Fields is still in its brainstorming stage and is facilitated at: http://groups.drupal.org/data-architecture-design-sprint”. That seems to be the best place to express your concerns/admirations at.