PRONOVIX

It's always been possible to use service bridges to delegate tasks between Drupal sites. Recently however a lot of new modules have been implemented for Drupal that are (going to) making this a lot easier. So much easier that I believe that Drupal service clouds, in which features are distributed over more than one specialized site, will become one of the great architecture options (together with organic groups, domain access and installation profile powered multi-site setups) to keep in mind when planning a project.

Together with the renaissance of installation profiles and Drupal distributions, this will make it more interesting to integrate a couple of distributions with a custom site than to try building all the features into 1 site. This is already happening with third party software integration projects such as the Alfresco and Apache Solr modules. A similar distributed feature architecture could however also be very interesting if implemented with a series of specialized Drupal sites.

In this post I'll talk about the pro and contra's of this approach and do a short review of the technologies that could be used to implement it.

At Pronovix we've been thinking about distributed service systems. I was asked to do some background/proof of concept research, and after one day, here is the first experimental module, called remote blocks.

The first thing what I want to say about this module, is that the access control is currently omitted, because I haven't find a really easy and clean way to do it (something what works in 5 minutes).

On the first screenshot, you can see the module's admin interface in my Drupal sandbox.

Few people would consider optimizing for bandwith, but sometimes it's worth it, for example if you have a strict limit on a hosting solution, or if you pay for the bandwidth (like on amazon ec2).
Even if you don't have those restrictions it could mean the difference between "that was slow" and "that was fast".
In this article we're going to focus on the server side settings that you could consider to achieve this goal.

In October Jeff Potts had a screencast in which he demonstrated how it's possible to integrate Alfresco into OpenAtrium through CMIS. Since we wanted to do some experiments for a project we are working on we recreated the feature.

We've uploaded the result at our feature server. The feature is at this point only experimental, not for the faint hearted also if you have never before installed Alfresco, be prepared for some troubleshooting, it's not obvious ;)

As you can see on the screenshots below, it does the same what Optaros presented in their video here.