Port Views to Drupal 7

I'm creating this issue to start the ball rolling with figuring out how Views in D7 is going to work. It goes without saying that Views is one of the most important modules in the Drupal community. It is also on everyone's mind (and Dries's List) that we want some (or ALL!) of the functionality of Views or a similar query builder in core. Furthermore, in order to ensure that DB TNG can do everything that Views needs to do we will want to get Views completely ported to Drupal 7 as early as possible so that there is time before the code freeze to get everything working.

This is all complicated massively by the level of abstraction of Fields in Core. It is now possible to have virtual fields that can live in another database or even not in the database at all (a field could actually be pulling in data from Amazon's web services for example). This means that a full port of views and its functionality is probably not yet possible without a better API to query core for field data (which has dangerous overlaps with what we currently use Views for).

I provide a very small patch which just adds the 200 some files in views to the code registry so that views can load all of its includes. Right now I've added all of this to the views.info file but some of it may belong in views_ui.inc. Even with this patch Drupal whitescreens at admin/build/views which is probably related to changes in drupal_render. As DamZ pointed out on IRC "drupal_render can't be called from a theme function on the same object anymore, this results in infinite loops".

Perhaps this should have its own team? Lets get the ball rolling!

Related discussion to some of these issues has been going on here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/19097 and at length in IRC.