May
15
2008
At last night's DBUG meetup, I gave a presentation about RESTful Web Services and Drupal. It's the first time I've given that presentation and it was still a little rough.
With about 15 people in attendance and nary a snore to be heard, though, I consider the presentation a success, despite having a nasally voice and a sore throat that caused me to stop for frequent sips of hot tea.
There's a lot of room for improvement in that presentation—much of which I realized while I was talking. Next time I give the presentation, I'll have had more time to prepare and I should have a fully-functional web service to demo plus a few other goodies to show off.
I've attached a PDF of the slides I used for the presentation for anyone interested.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| restful_web_services_and_drupal.pdf | 413.71 KB |
- Tags: Drupal, REST, Web Services
Comments
Rob Loach writes:
Hi Greg! I just wanted to say the slides looked awesome. Wish I could've been there. Drupal really needs to go into the direction of web services and am looking forward to some of the issues going into core:
http://drupal.org/node/145551
http://drupal.org/node/218830
There were a couple more, but I can't seem to find them.
Anyway, great presentation! Keep it up!
Rob
GregHines writes:
Thanks, Rob.
Those links are great. I'm glad some work has gone into multiple representations of the same resource. That (along with its partner, content negotiation) is one of the bigger stumbling blocks that prevents Drupal from being a first-class web service platform. I hope I can contribute something to that effort.
As for Drupal lacking a suitable controller (as I mentioned in the presentation), be on the lookout for a development on that by the end of the week or so. ;)
I'm glad that others are interested in RESTful Drupal. I've followed some of the work you've done in this area--in particular the Services and REST Server modules. Good stuff, but I've got some ideas I'll be shooting out there soon enough.
Steve Pomeroy writes:
Are you doing anything with http://drupal.org/project/restapi ? I have been pounding away at it, trying to make it more reasonable. Obviously I'm not interested in seeing duplicated effort. Really, this belongs in core, but that's a bit of a ways off for my needs.
GregHines writes:
Actually, the work I've done has been separate from the REST API module, but that doesn't mean there's much in the way of duplicated work. What I've created is a simple controller for RESTful services; it assumes little about services and it's designed for creating something other than "Drupal web services" (i.e. services focused on modifying Drupal in some way). I'll probably have a release up sometime next week.