Dear All,
We intend to develop a complex site and we are keen to use Drupal as a base engine for our project. We recognize a number of advantages of using Drupal, such as light-weight, consistent code base, implementation flexibility, as well as the well-established community. We primarily want to use Drupal for user/session handling and convenient content management. Now, there are some relevant questions that we would need to have answered before we would enter the development process:
1) We would preferably have our content (nodes) and user-base stored in a different database than Drupal configuration data. In other words, we would like to separate critical business data from the the system-specific information that determines the way Drupal core and related modules operate. Is it workable, and if so, sensible at all? What would be alternate solutions to achieve this?
2) We want to keep our site simple to browse and navigate. Indeed, Drupal comes handy to meet that purpose, however, for our future users' convenience we would like to develop a mini application - a content browser that would make search for a specific piece of content easy and seamless process, based on a set of specific criteria (we already have a data model in mind that would become a foundation for our MVC approach here).
Now, to my knowledge this could be achieved by functions offered by Views and CCK modules combined or building AJAX interface with jQuery (please correct me if I'm mistaken). We started to play around with Wavemaker software (formerly ActiveGrid) and we like a lot the way in which application development process is being handled. Our questions are as follows:
a) Will the output application work with Drupal on a 'plug-in' basis?
b) If so, how to embed such 3rd party application within Drupal?
c) Which Drupal function allows (if at all) to provide a 'container' that would display our RIA?
d) Will our mini-app be able to interact with Drupal (pass variables, retrieve nodes if needed)
e) Is it at all workable and therefore worth considering or it's better to research alternate solutions?
To clarify: what we would like to achieve is to use Drupal for back-end (fully) and front-end (partially), while retaining the possibility to embed a 3rd party application that will be able to connect to, retrieve and store data from custom MySQL database?
We shall be very grateful for any ideas, thank you in advance.
With kind regards, Piotr.
