Drupal Services

Here at Judah Skype all of our current projects use the Drupal Services Module Most are powering mobile apps, and one project uses Services to turn Drupal into an integration server. Yes, you heard that right -- it serves no web pages to end users. The adminstrator configures content on the server, and essentially is able to do complete re-configures of all the clients remotely.

It's That Time of Year Again

About once a year I attempt to leave Emacs as my primary development environment. Why, you ask? Client work often forces me to use Eclipse based IDEs for, say, Adobe Flex development. Then I see the oh so sweet debugger, and lots of features I admire in the memory hogging IDE. Memory is cheap though ...

I checked to see if blogging about this was prohibited by the Adobe Pre-release program, but I don't see it on their site or in the FAQ, so let's assume it is until we hear otherwise. Not their bad code anyways. For anyone struggling with getting the Adobe AIR for Android CameraUI class to work on their Droid X, they can stop. We've been experimenting with AIR for Android to asses it's reliability as a mobile development environment.

Recently I was asked by a friend to create a simple, one-level mobile app. Essentially he wanted some category headings, then when he pressed the category heading some extended information would come up. Looks did not matter, this was just for him. After a little thought I came up with the 5 hour mobile app, and it occurred to me that others might be interested is how quickly you can build a quick and dirty mobile app with Drupal and Titanium Appcelerator when the target is a small user base.

How Open Source Works

Open source software projects, such as Drupal, offer many clear advantages to a business.

The Setup

It's two weeks into my two and a half week vacation in Buenos Aires, and I suddenly have insomnia. What's a developer to do at 2 AM in a country where stuff is happening, but he does not know where and could not communicate if he did? Why, read the Titanium Appcelerator Developer Guide for TableViews! Well, either that or get that Drupal Module in shape to submit to Drupal.org. But we did not go that way -- I want all my wits about me for that one.

The Goal

It was hard to choose a topic to write about for this post (hey, it's been hard to find time to write at all in the midst of all the interesting things happening lately!). I was thinking of a new Drupal module that integrates to an e-Commerce provider; some different and better ways we're using Git; command line Ant tasks for Flex; and a bunch more. But today I want to write about an approach for implementing Android menus in Appcelerator Titanium. After some agony we've chosen to go this way over Sencha Touch (HTML5) for mobile development.

As a long time fan of the wonderful Sacha Chua, I was very interested to find she worked with IBM to help them learn about Drupal. But long before Drupal, Sacha was one of the leading Emacs enthusiasts in the world. So I read with great interest when she wrote about using YASnippet in Emacs with Drupal.

Technically the content creation page on Drupal is more properly called the 'node add' page. As expected this name comes straight from the URL which is, of course, node/add!

Description We have clients who are using streaming media servers (Wowza and Flash Media Server) as well as a private project on the Red5 open source server. Soon we found ourselves in need of an MXML component that can play real-time video. A little time with Google soon showed me there are hundreds of code examples if you want to play on-demand, but not many with real-time video streams.