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Book a DemoWhy Drupal 8 Will Eat the Enterprise Web Application World
July 29, 2016 - by Philip Bliss
Well it’s not actually eating the world – but Drupal 8 shows a new appetite for the emerging web applications infrastructure. With over 38% of Fortune 500 companies and a dominant platform in Higher Education and Government – it is a big deal when Drupal changes completely – something it has been doing over the past 24 months. But, now that the gnashing of teeth stage is over, I think it is fair to say that Drupal 8 will eat up the enterprise web application world.
With Drupal 8 organizations can leverage other web and enterprise applications and take the best of what’s out there and run them in an integrated CMS environment. Drupal 8 recognizes that lots of the new, innovative applications outside the Drupal community can work really well within a Drupal framework – this is a massive benefit. I think we all know that API’s are the future, and with Drupal you can customize your own application stack using API’s from a single Drupal dashboard.
For a long-time Drupal developer, this is even more exciting than the move from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 – which led to a whole new trajectory for Drupal as a leading CMS platform. I think that the Drupal 8 architecture really expands the Drupal user community. Now you don’t have to “know” Drupal. With PHP and object-oriented programming, any developer is set to dive in and develop on the Drupal platform.
We love how ExpertFile solves so many of the problems with building and managing content related to the people in organizations. With Drupal we saw a way to integrate this awesome platform much more easily with Drupal core – all within a single dashboard. We’ve now effectively built the middleware that connects ExpertFile with Drupal – so now you can get the best of both worlds via an open source Drupal 7/8 module which we have built and will be contributing to the Drupal community. A formal announce the will be made next week at the Eduweb conference in Denver on August 1.
Now when you install ExpertFile using Drupal you get the following benefits:
- Faster configuration – no need to setup, manage, or modify the API.
- Fully integrated analytics/measurement, compliance and security
- Improved performance with Drupal’s caching mechanisms – API results are stored locally and only request update information across the network when needed.
With Drupal 8 you can simply run it as your backend engine and use client-side frameworks such as Angular JS as your front-end. Drupal 8 has several important previous contributed modules built into core now which means better integration and performance. One of these being Views which allow you to display data in almost any format – that is awesome. Templating and theming setup is much easier. You can use any templating engine you want. Just set the rules and go. Drupal 8 now also leverages components from the Symfony PHP web application framework. Now you don’t need to “know” Drupal” to build in it and access its benefits.
Now that Drupal 8 recognizes that lots of the new, innovative applications outside the Drupal community can work best within the Drupal framework – I think Drupal 8 will become the go to open source enterprise web application platform for even more organizations.
Stay tuned. Perceptible is launching the new ExpertFile module at the EduWeb conference for higher education August 1-2. We will be maintaining and building a user community that accesses the module. Are you part of the Drupal community or new to the platform? We would love to know what you think. Drop us a line.