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Drupal - Glue For Your Web Software - Continued

Submitted by Mark Sacco on Sat, 09/25/2010 - 18:05

Ok, so we’ve scoped the challenge and we’ve stated that Drupal is a great solution.

Well, how can a content management solution really help us here? Great question. Let’s dig in and talk a bit about Drupal’s architecture and its core components – and let’s work from the OS to the UI tier of your application.

First, Drupal’s core is written in PHP and affords us the opportunity to run on any OS. PHP, as you know, delivers great performance, is itself extensible, and scales well.

Moving up the stack we find Drupal’s core services. These core services include database access, templating, user management, session management, general content management, image management, etc. These services are exposed through XMLRPC, SOAP, REST or any other protocol you care to integrate into the platform.

The resulting collection of servers and services, combined with the existing or added services (5800 modules available), can WRAP your solution, giving you a powerful customization / packaging engine that and product manager or product marketing manager would ‘love’ to have access to.

Services: An API for remote applications
Services is a standardized API for Drupal that allows you to create "services", or a collection of methods, intended for consumption by remote applications. Several "servers", or protocols, provide different ways to call these methods from remote site. It works similar to the existing XMLRPC capabilities of Drupal, but provides additional functionality like:

  • Pluggable "service" modules allowing developers to add additional remote services
  • Pluggable authentication mechanisms
  • Pluggable "server" modules allowing for protocols other than XMLRPC (like SOAP, REST, AMF)
  • A number of included service modules which interact with existing Drupal modules like node, taxonomy, user, views, and system
  • Pluggable "server" modules allowing for protocols other than XMLRPC (like SOAP, REST, AMF)

Great Stuff and just the beginning for Drupal-As-A-Framework. (Hey, did we just create a new acronym? DAAF?)