Sunday, July 31, 2011

Drupal and Mobile Apps


Today having a website is synonymous to being accessible in all devices. Drupal is being used as the backend Data store for a large number of Mobile Apps. Mobile Apps could be Iphone Apps, Anroid Apps or specifically for Blackberry.

The two modules that are being widely used in building Drupal based Mobile Apps are Services and View Data Source modules.

Services Modules

Services Module allows you to expose drupal data to external websites or Mobile applications. Earlier Services was used to integrate Flash with Drupal, today most of the use cases of Services module are for Mobile Apps, where Drupal acts as the backend. The power of services module is that it has multiple interfaces and hence brings with greater flexibility. The Programmer can focus on handling the content while Service takes care of the json response in appropriate format.

The Main components of the Services module are:

Servers: That Receive and Send requests
Authentication Layer
Services: These Process data that need to be pulled out of the Drupal backend

Link to Module Page: http://drupal.org/project/services

Views Data Source

This module allows you to render out put from various views in a variety of formats. The Module is extremely simple to use: Create a view as required, choose page display and one of the Views Data Source formats.

Link to Module page: http://drupal.org/project/views_datasource

Reference links:

http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-105-greg-dunlap-on-services-module-and-mobile-apps
http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupal-voices-208-pat-teglia-on-developing-mobile-apps-with-titanium-framework
http://www.lullabot.com/articles/module-monday-views-datasource
http://chicago2011.drupal.org/conference/bof/mobile-apps-use-drupal-backend-w-services-modules-nysenate
http://groups.drupal.org/mobile

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