Decoupled Drupal approach

Discover our Decoupled Drupal Approach

Drupal has been a very popular content management system since 2001 and has evolved into a large-scale used solution, having over 1 million websites that use it as a platform. Nowadays, Drupal 9 offers a variety of implementations, providing flexibility and customization at various levels, with the possibility of customizing its services to a perfectly tailored solution for the project’s needs.

This is mainly acquired by using Drupal as a decoupled back-end, thus allowing the front-end part to be developed in various technologies. While the future of web applications seems to be microservices, exposing content or entities to the front-end enables the use of any technology to render the application.

Decoupled Drupal Services

Decoupled Drupal

Also called Headless Drupal, stores and manages data and makes it available through web service APIs

Drupal back-office

Developers can fully benefit from the CMS aspect, creating fieldable entities, complex data structures, and vast editable content

Drupal’s core

Any logic needed or functionality is developed in custom modules, which plug into Drupal’s core through services

RESTful APIs

(API that conforms to the REST-style architecture), we can send the data in JSON or XML formats

Drupal RESTful solution

Below we have Drupal’s core and contributed modules that can help develop a decoupled solution.

/**
* Provides a Tremend Resource
*
* @RestResource(
*   id = "tremend_resource",
*   label = @Translation("Tremend Resource"),
*   uri_paths = {
*     "cannonical" = "/tremend_rest_api/tremend_resource"
*   }
* )
*/
class TremendResource extends ResourceBase {

  /**
   * Responds to entity GET requests.
   * @return \Drupal\rest\ResourceResponse
   */
  public function get() {
    $response = ['message' => 'Hello, World!'];
    return new ResourceResponse($response);
  }
}

Applicability

Using Drupal as a headless back-end implementation allows us to serve content and complex flows, from user registration, authentication, and user groups, to a dynamic feed, tailored to various flags that the user chooses through the application, and a shop functionality that enables users to redeem prizes or products, and is always in sync with the back-end defined stock and options. In this way, we can serve this solution to many types of devices, including:

Websites and native mobile apps

Internet of Things
apps

CRM systems

Different services will use the most appropriate technology through this approach, fostering reusability, scalability, cost reduction, and continuous delivery.