blogginglemon

i've been playing (read "working") for a while with Drupal and Flash, time to settle down and write a little feedback about it. This post is to be considered as a theoretical introduction and i'll cover some technical stuff in the next posts. [Update] see part 1 here [/Update]

Why Flash

ok, this is an easy one (for me at least!) i've always loved the flexibility of Flash (or Flex) and it has become my day to day business. In the last 10 years I built great amount of sites, modules for html sites, interactive apps with Flash. Hate it if you want, i still think it's relevant for many purposes.

Why Drupal

The majority of the sites i built needed a backend to store the data, and an easy way of manipulating it (read CMS here). I used to build my own CMS, each time perfectly fitted for the project and each time different... I did some in Php/mySql, some with a Flex front-end (on top of php/mysql), some relying exclusively on XML, etc... The fact is that i used to spend more time on the CMS than on the front-end. My clients were happy, but my wallet wasn't... This is where i met Drupal. I used to hate those CMS, thinking i'd rather spend my time developping something new than learning how to hack them. But now that i look back, the only thing that i can say is: "god i lost so much time!"

Drupal is very flexible, and it gives you a lot of power with only a few clicks. Think "user permission" (let your client change this and that but not the rest) or "Multi-languages" (even if this is far from perfect in Drupal... it's already way easier than if you try to implement it yourself!), this is just a few clicks away. Furthermore it's open source, so you can always look at the source to know what's going on. Finally Drupal modular constuction makes it easy to add new functionalities either by adding new modules shared by the community (which is huge btw) or create your own.

The meeting

Drupal last but not least argument, is that it provides a services module which works on top of amfphp to access, modify or delete your Drupal content (or not! thanks to a smart permission set). This makes it really easy to build a Flash layer on top of Drupal. This module is still in dev but it's already stable enough to be used in production.

So that you can now combine the best of both worlds: a super CMS on one hand, and an interactive Flash layer on the other. Even better, as Drupal automatically creates html pages from your content, you get a html site fully working (though not styled) optimized for SEO, and usable on devices that don't support Flash (hum.. you know...)

Services module is just one way of getting data out of Drupal, but there are many others: you could create XML (JSON,...) on the fly from your data, and load those XML in Flash, or use PHP to directly access the DB data (not recommended though).

In the next posts i'll go over more technical stuff, like how to connect Flash and Drupal easily. [Update] see part 1 here [/Update]