Web Services With Drupal, or The Acronym Parade: A Dance With APIs

Abstract:

You can provide and consume web services easily with Drupal core and contributed community modules.

Room:

Evergreen B

Presentation Date:

Sun, 2009-06-28 12:00

In this session I'll talk about how you can use Drupal as a web service for providing and communicating data for third-party consumption. I'll talk about some of the available solutions such as the built in XML-RPC server and other servers and protocols (though not SOAP) available via contributed community modules. This session won't be an overview of the properties of web services but rather a discussion and demo on implementing web service endpoints and clients with Drupal.

Topics include

The "What are 'web services'?" slide
What you get out of the box (methods for consumption, XMLRPC)
RESTful-like demo of a URL shortener service
clients and easily consuming services

Pre-requisites:

Basic familiarity with Drupal development is encouraged but not required. If you don't know what implementing hook_menu() means you'll be confused when we look at code, but I hope you walk away with the basics of web service implementations in Drupal.