By RobKoberg on

(Not sure if this is the best place to post, and could not find information from searches. Very new to D8)

I am interested in separating out the theme layer from the server to the client (using angularjs, but shouldn't matter to the drupal side). The client side would be on a CDN and make RESTful calls to the CORS drupal app server. (Possibly pushing published node/content chunks off to the CDN.) I am also interested in a highly scalable drupal and would like to bootstrap it to lower levels like DATABASE or if needed for an authenticated user, SESSION.

Has anything gone into version 8 that makes this easier? Any links to discussions about this type of thing?

For version 7 there is the js module - https://drupal.org/project/js. I have done this for a site in v7, but usually needed to do a full bootstrap. For example, I made an directive that handles drupal forms. Because some fields were using theme functions I had to do a full bootstrap. For example, for registration, the user picture field, which I had not enabled in admin settings and removed from the form with code was still there somehow and required me to bring in the theme layer.

As the js module shows, you can get significant speed improvements bootstrapping to a lower level.

Full bootstrap:

ab -n20 -c1 http://example.com/index.php?q=js/mymodule/callback
  Requests per second: 2.24 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:    446.846 [ms] (mean)

Not sure what bootstrap level was used (probably DATABASE), but here:

ab -n20 -c1 http://example.com/js.php?q=js/mymodule/callback
  Requests per second: 16.84 [#/sec] (mean)
  Time per request:    59.371 [ms] (mean)
⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x