Drupalcon Day 2

Today’s highlight was Drupal + Flash. I had 2 sessions at the end of the day on this. One with Drupal + Flash and one with Drupal + Flex. The idea is to use Drupal as a backend for Flash projects. It’s genius! Separating content from presentation even further. Even more, it’s very simple. It uses the Services module in drupal to use AMFPHP (AMF = Actionscript message format, PHP = PHP).  So Drupal will manage the flash connection to it with a session id, which keeps it secure. It uses flash’s NetConnection functionality and it’s rather simple. The most difficult part for me would be the PHP, just because I don’t program PHP, but drupal would need to respond to flash comments with the hook_service() command and custom functions that flash calls would be defined in here. Drupal can pass node titles, bodies, any CCK fields, taxonomy terms, and even files! Oh and the drupal login? Yea, flash can handle that too. It’s really quite impressive. You can build an entire flash front end website with Drupal as the CMS backend where a client can maintain the content. That’s pretty impressive! Travis Tidwell led this session and I must say he made it very simple and easy to understand for both experts and novices alike.

Flex can do something very similar. I’m not as savvy with Flex, just because it deals more with the backend programming that I try to stay away from. It uses the Services module in Drupal as well and can feed your Flex application with Drupal data. The code is shorter using MXML but I’d rather stick with what I know and what I’m good at… the design stuff with Flash. Not enough room in my brain for Flex.

Another good session I saw was on Scaling Drupal. They talked about how to make your site faster as it gets larger. I was very happy to see everything they mentioned we use. From tools to techniques… we covered most of it. Load testing (hp load runner, openload, jmeter), foxyproxy (never used this one), ySlow, standard drupal core caching, memcache, block cache, gzip, boost module (never used this either), Cacti (never used this), js aggregation, load js at bottom of pages, css aggregation and now CDNs which we’re looking into.

I found it amusing that almost everyone (well not everyone, but the majority!) has macs. It’s great that developers are now using macs… of course boot camp and vmware fusion/parallels has helped so they can run windows at the same time. Even if they don’t know it… the usability in the macOS is so stellar it may impress upon them how usable their sites/modules etc. could be… or maybe they’re just code monkeys Here’s a screenshot I took during one of my sessions… Yes, that’s 108 computers on the wifi network and only 6, yes SIX windows computers, the other 102 are macs

There was a funny keynote today on “Is Drupal Moral?”. The speaker, David Weinberger, a philsopher, was pretty funny. His powerpoint was fantastic too.