Univate has recently been involved in a video project. We were impressed with the Kaltura (www.kaltura.org) tools for managing, hosting and streaming video content and were also keen to use it has it had an existing drupal module ready to go. Being that it promotes itself as an open source project that is always a plus.

Unfortunately what it came time to develop the features for the specific site the drupal module did not live up to its promises and required a massive cleanup.

Drupal is written in the PHP programming language, and its not uncommon for programmers (particularly ones that use other language) to comment on how bad a programming language PHP is. And a lot of the point they tend to make we would also agree with to some degree. But really the biggest weakness of any programming language is the developers writing the code. If a developer does not understand the tools they are using they can not expect to develop good code in that language. This also applies to writing good Drupal modules and code as Drupal is a not just a content management system, it is framework for building applications.

Drupal provides developers with a rich set of API's and interfaces for allowing application to integrate natively with its features, but if you don't really understand how Drupal works you can't capture the full benefit of what Drupal offers.

Back to the Kaltura video module, we have uploaded a altered version of the module which attempts to clean up a number of bad approaches used in the module. You can find our code here:
http://github.com/univate/drupal-kaltura