RESTful application with Drupal 8Concept / Overview / Demonstration / Happyness

Introduction

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More than 150 projects in Drupal

Introduction

Technical Director at Esokia

10 years of experience in PHP

7 years of experience in Drupal

What is Drupal?

Free, community-built website development tool

Modular and extensible content management

Open source

Built on PHP

Created by Dries Buytaert

First release in January 2001

Drupal now

Drupal 8 released on November, 2015 (approx.)

Big architectural changes

Built with

About the sessionA little warm-up

An overview about Drupal 8 and this new core capability to build RESTful application. From a basic utilisation to a more complexe use case, we will made a global overview of possible exploitation of Drupal 8 RESTful aspect.

Warm-up

Drupal 8 is the next main version of Drupal’s CMS, a quick overview and presentation will be made for exposing the concept.

On the next topic, we will see what is REST and key concept about a RESTful application, with basic exemple and application. A more advanced concept will be see in the next topic, with a presentation about an utilisation of JavaScript to use a Drupal 8 RESTful application and a more complex example with a NodeJS / ExpressJS application.

RESTful?REpresentational

State

Transfert

An application that implements the REST architectural style is called a RESTful application

REST PrincipleCommunicate over HTTP protocol using HTTP verbs that web browsers use between client and server

GET

PUT

DELETE

POST

PATCH

etc

REST Implementation - Two ways

GET → Retreive something

POST → Create something

DELETE → Delete something

PATCH → Update something

GET → Retrieve something

POST → Update something

DELETE → Delete something

PUT → Create something

What is REST in Drupal?

Make possible for other applications to read and update information on your site via the Web.

REST is one of a number of different ways of making it available.

In contrast to other techniques such as SOAP or XML-RPC, REST encourages developers to rely on HTTP methods (such as GET and POST) to operate on "resources" (data managed by Drupal).

RESTful Web Service API

The RESTful Web Services API is new in Drupal 8.

For each REST resource, you can specify the supported verbs (i.e. GET, POST…), and for each verb, you can specify the serialization formats & authentication mechanisms.

In Drupal 8, there is a single central location to configure all REST resources that a site exposes: rest.settings.yml.

A permission is generated for every resource + verb, users need this permission to be able to interact with this REST resource.

GET

For reading content entities.Read-only method.

Considered as a safe method.

Results are automatically cached.

POST

For creating content entities.Some entities need a _links entry to the user and / or to the referenced entity.

Never POST a UUID (or node ID/comment ID/…) as you create a new entity.

Considered as an unsafe method.

Need a CSRF Token.

PATCH

For updading content entities.When PATCHing resources, only send the changes.

Considered as an unsafe method.

Need a CSRF Token.

DELETE

For deleting content entities.Content-type header not necessary (no request body).

Considered as an unsafe method.

Need a CSRF Token.

Basic Example

Read and write data from your Drupal installation with a couple of modules.

Requirements:

RESTful Web Services (rest)

Serialization (serialization)

Hypertext Application Language (hal)

HTTP Basic Authentication (basic_auth)

REST UI (a “Nice To Have”)

Core module to enable

REST UI interface

List of permissions for using REST

Basic example in action

Little demonstration?

JS + D8 RESTful Web Services

Can be use with every kind of entities in Drupal 8 if they are exposed for REST.

Just implement an HTTP request and let’s go.

Easy to separate client and server.

Improve the client code’s portability.

Servers can be simpler and more scalable.

JQuery exampleJQuery already loaded in Drupal (JQuery 1.7)

Every Drupal 8 project can be easily RESTful with client-server separation

GET / POST /PATCH / DELETE still available

Advanced Example

Building a timesheet application in Drupal 8 with a separated front-end.

What we need?

A Drupal 8 installation with RESTful Web Services API

Something funny like NodeJS

ExpressJS or a similar framework

RequirementsLAMP Stack for the backend

Linux

Apache

MySQL

PHP

RequirementsMEAN Stack for the frontend

MongoDB

ExpressJS

AngularJS

NodeJS

RequirementsRESTful Web Services

Views

Field UI (nice to have)

REST UI (nice to have)Drupal 8 installation

Live conding?

LAMP Stack

Be efficient: Google Cloud + Bitnami is a good combo! :-D

Good combo is a pre-installed Drupal’s LAMP Stack.

MEAN Stack

Be efficient: Google Cloud + Bitnami is a good combo! :-D (really!)

NodeJS Locally

ExpressJS Locally

ExpressJS locally

Let’s try

Drupal:● Content type● Views● Permissions

Remember to configure the view for the REST Export!

Let’s try

ExpressJS● Don’t forget to npm init before!● And npm install express --save for dependencies● You can add a template engine, add route with parameters,

etc

Drupal <-> NodeJS

Need to install NPM Request module

Load it in your Express App

Interact with Drupal!

Questions?

Thank you!