Headless Drupal
The Gizra way
//DavidHernández
- Preparing a Restful endpoint in the backend
- Consuming the API on the frontend
- Real time notifications
Grab the code:
https://github.com/RoySegall/drupal-elm-starter
Backend
RESTful is a way to communicate between a provider (Drupal) and a consumer (JS application) using several fundamentals operations:
GET, POST, DELETE, PATCH/PUT
The Restful module
- Maintained by amitaibu and e0ipso
- Avoid drupalisms
- Supports versioning
- Supports multiple formats
- Build for developers
Authentication
There are couple of ways to authenticate using the RESTful module but let’s talk about something a bit more “global” - access token.
Access token is a string contains odd characters and numbers which represent the user in the system. We will pass the access token in each request.
$http.get('http://localhost/drupal/api/login-token', {
headers: {
'Authorization': 'Basic ' + Base64.encode(username + ':' + password)
}
})
Coding time
Creating content (POST)
Frontend
How do you call an Elm developer?
ELMO
- Elm is a purely functional language
- For creating web browser based graphical UIs
- It’s compiled into javascript
- Focused into usability, performance and robustness
- Statically typed
On the business side:
- Clients pay for the features, not the bugs.
- Compilation errors VS Runtime exceptions
On the dev side:
- Easy testing
- Quick development
- It’s super fun
The Elm Architecture
- A model to represent our data
- A view for representing the model
- Messages for the operations we can do with our model
- An update function to modify our data
Elm 101
Types
Union types
Dealing with Union types
Records and functions
Coding time
again!
Real time notifications
There are two ways of communication
One way direction (HTTP)
Bidirectional (phone call)
Websockets
Websocket is a communication protocol which connect a server and a client and allow to stream data regularly.
Pusher
Pusher is a service that allows us to keep track of the active users and send them notifications in real time.
