Posted by bg1 on March 16, 2010 at 10:58pm
Not sure Services is exactly where this belongs, but it the closest I have seen so far.
I want to integrate Drupal with other applications. But in every case, the Drupal application is the junior partner. I.e., I can change my Drupal application but I cannot make any changes to the other applications. I have to use their web services as they are.
Are there any "supported" modules in Drupal that simplify the process of connecting Drupal with remote web services? (Supported meaning that there is an active group behind the module or API involved.)
Thanks.
Comments
Well, first of all you need
Well, first of all you need to tell us what or what kind of service it is that you want connect to.
Tack så mycket for
Tack så mycket for responding.
Could be SOAP or REST. I am trying to use Drupal as a front end to the applications I am building (to provide content management - as opposed to data management -community functions and UI appearance and because I like the idea of a community of developers). Ideally I would be able to integrate drupal with external web services with an absolute minimum of programming on the Drupal side. (I am an experienced developer - 100% Microsoft and mostly the backend of applications - who has absolutely no experience with PHP, Apache or anything outside of Microsoft.) Therefore I am looking for a moodule that would support developing of web service clients that could tie in to other Drupal modules for the UI functionality.
Is that realistic thinking?
I say ideally, because I am not really opposed to learning PHP, but I am trying to figure out if and how Drupal would make sense for large scale integrated projects. (To take an extreme, imagine a large scale process automation application suite for an almost fully automated manufacturing plant that has some exception processes - a few hundred - and some pure heads down data entry processes. Imagine further that the users involved are scattered all over the planet.)
I would like to find a Drupal Group that is focused on the general theme of Drupal integration with all the various options and best practices (I would be interested in helping document such options and the like but don't want to step on toes if there is already a group with that focus.)
Thanks again for any suggestions.
so, your...
asking for a MASH-UP portal.
You have all of these back end applications serving up JSON, SOAP, REST...
What if you served up the data to a FLASH widget from each back end service?
Have you thought about using BLOCK, with or without the PHP filter turned on.
Its not SERVICES, but i have a hunch it would be an interesting solution.
You could also just display the FLASH WIDGETs that update them selves from the JSON feed.
Going the other way... using DRUPAL as a FrontEnd to the "heads down" keypunching.
I am guessing that you mean scheduling Batch jobs?
In this case, you could make a BATCH a CCK type, with a Date field or something like that.
You would export the data using something like VIew-Datasource module.
My background is Industrial Automation as well, and I have always thought that DRUPAL would be in interesting solution for batch and continues operation / reporting.
Another idea... keeping in mind that your a MS guy ( so am I )... If your doing any kind of trending, SCADA, then mySQL is probably a pretty good choice. But I don't recommend using DRUPAL for that. You can, however, pump your data to a dedcated mySQL DB, run an hourly CRON to generate a generate a summary record, then pump it into a DRUPAL CCK. That would be a very elegant solution, and not dificult to do. It would allow you a way to consolidate all of your final reports for review. I did a project one time where we were loading material from the factory directly to Hopper cars ( no storage silos ), and we had to create a manifest. I think drupal would have been perfect to not only for scheduling the batch, all the way to logging the Hopper car to creating the manifeast to exposing the manifeast to the customer for tracking.
Well, services is geared
Well, services is geared towards providing web services, though the people who are hanging out here generally are pretty adept at consuming services too. It's difficult to answer your question as it's very generic. Though there is the client project http://drupal.org/project/clients that's maintained by adub, and I've written a http_client http://drupal.org/project/http_client that's suitable for use with REST services. Probably neither of these will be a plug and play solution (although the goal of clients is to become one)
New modules
While searching about this, I found this to be recent:
http://drupal.org/project/wsclient