Drupal, enterprise-wide

Start: 2006-02-07 14:30
End: 2006-02-07 15:45
Location: one of the rooms

Moderator:: Chris Johnson

Drupal can be more than just another single web site content management system (CMS). Can and should it be used as an enterprise-wide web application framework?

Due to its modular design and well thought out interfaces, extending Drupal's functionality is straight forward -- and more importantly, actually makes sense, as it can be done cleanly and efficiently. Drupal also has the basic framework for shared authentication and distributed data through features like XML-RPC, RSS and more, as well as more mundane features like a database abstraction and sessions.

Discussion will focus on the kinds of features needed by an enterprise web application framework, how Drupal can provide those, and where Drupal falls short.
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Motivations

My initial concept for this session is centered around using Drupal as a framework for building a variety of web applications within the context of a business, since that is part of what I'm currently doing at my place of employment.

I've spent 6 years building various web applications for our extranet using PHPLIB (phplib.sourceforge.net). When I started, I needed sessions (this was before PHP had sessions itself) and user authentication. PHPLIB provided these features, as well as a nice database abstraction.

I'm continuing to build new functionality and web applications, including such things as connectivity to other systems via proprietary TCP socket connections as well as via SOAP interfaces. I've ended up with a hodge-podge of things, and no consistent user interface. I've also pretty much coded everything from scratch, other than what PHPLIB gave me. This meant more work than it would require now using some good libraries, classes and/or framework.

So I've looked for a better way to leverage my time and to integrate everything under one consistent GUI. Drupal looks like one possible good answer. It provides many of the basic services (authentication, database, user data handling), puts it all under a nice looking theme, and is extremely modular and well written, making it easy to extend.

This session is about this aspect of using Drupal -- not just as a CMS engine for a single site, or even a community of sites -- but as a tool to build bigger, more varied applications. There are some areas where Drupal is weak in providing needed support. If enough people are interested, perhaps we can get some development into core that will make it a better framework for such purposes.

Or perhaps I'll learn it was not such a good idea after all! :-)

Session Topic Outline

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Outline of Topics

• Secure distributed authentication
• Performance tuning
• Multiple database support
• Your...
• ...Ideas...
• ...Here.