Drupal 7 Web Services Crash Course
- 1. WEB SERVICES CRASH COURSE Presented by: Noah Lively, Founder of KoreMedia Productions DRUPAL 7
- 2. PURPOSE OF THIS CLASS: Demonstrate how to use Drupal 7 as a web service endpoint. Why? So you can connect apps and other websites to your Drupal site.
- 3. ANALOGY: Let Drupal be the “brain” Let your apps be the “face”
- 4. WHY DRUPAL WEB SERVICES: Because web services are cool Because a website is much more versatile when it can connect with other sites (continued)
- 5. WHY DRUPAL WEB SERVICES: Because Drupal provides an excellent hybrid solution between powerful CMS and web service platform Leverage an enterprise-class CMS Provide a web-based back-end management interface via core platform Provide a web-based front-end user interface via core platform Provide a mobile app or HTML5 app interface via web services
- 6. EXAMPLE APP: PIZZA SHOP Back-end: A Drupal site acts as the application server and content management platform. Manager can manage the menu through the Drupal site. Drupal site receives orders and notifies the manager.
- 7. EXAMPLE APP: PIZZA SHOP Front-end: An AngularJS app connects to Drupal and displays pizzas in a responsive web page. Customers can order pizzas from the app, which triggers a server-side email to the manager (via web services) Customers can make menu suggestions by configuring their own pizza topping combinations. These suggestions get added as “unpublished” nodes to the Drupal site via web services.
- 8. MODULES: Common modules to use and be aware of: Services – Core platform that exposes existing data types to Drupal Oauth or OAuth2 CORS – cross-origin resource sharing. Provides necessary web server headers to allow front-end apps to access the data Services Views
- 9. DRUPAL SETUP: Install services module Configure a web service endpoint Select which web service methods to enable for that endpoint Configure authentication (session, oauth or none) Install services_views module to use views as web service endpoints Write your own service endpoints by implementing hook_services_resources() in your module
- 10. TESTING IT OUT: Install the Postman extension on Google chrome Set up an HTTP request in Postman pointing to your web service method: (SITE URL) + (ENDPOINT PATH) + (METHOD NAME).json For example usage, download the Postman collection referenced at the end of this presentation and install it into your local Postman app
- 11. EXAMPLE CODE: Example site (includes database dump): https://github.com/nlively/pizza_shop Example app: https://github.com/nlively/pizza_shop_app Postman collection: https://www.getpostman.com/collections/26f40e0428bd1ba8c10 9
- 12. CONTACT ME: Email: noah@koremedia.net Twitter: noahlively Skype: noahlively Drupal.org: noahlively
- 13. ABOUT ME: Noah Lively Been involved in Drupal development since 2008. Founder and CEO of KoreMedia Productions, a full-service Rocklin-based Drupal firm Co-creator of WindowAgent, a Drupal-backed product that takes real estate listings from the MLS and exposes them via a touch screen interface
- 14. ABOUT KOREMEDIA: We are a growing team of Drupal devs. Our key strengths are in connecting Drupal to other platforms and upgrading Drupal sites (major versions), and optimizing Drupal for the enterprise.