Feature

The latest rage in the Content Management world is the idea of a “decoupled CMS.” That is, rather than having a single monolithic system that handles everything from content entry to management to display and theming in one program spread, that responsibility is assigned to different systems: one that is really really good at content storage, one that's really really good at content management, one that's really really good at display and theming, etc.

At the same time, there has been a huge push for web services in almost every market. If you want content to be available anywhere besides an HTML page, then your answer is web services.

Drupal 8 will make huge strides in this area, but alas it's not out yet. Fortunately the answer to the second problem is the first; it is entirely possible to build a solid, scalable, performant RESTful web service with Drupal 7 by decoupling Drupal from the web service.

Recently, Palantir.net did exactly that for a major media client, video hosting service Ooyala, and it really drove home both the power of web services and the potential of a decoupled architecture.

The Problem

Ooyala wanted us to build a video curation service for one of their customers.

The first part of the problem was that the customer had data that was regularly updated, but this existing data source was incomplete, occasionally unreliable, and could be enriched with additional metadata, so human management was required before it could be used in the desired context (to describe video content in end-user-facing video-on-demand applications). The solution to this particular problem was the CMS.
The second part of the problem was getting the data in the desired context: highly interactive video-on-demand applications where users could purchase access to individual movies or episodes, collections of movies, seasons of a show, or other arbitrary groupings. The solution here was a REST API separated from the CMS.

Not complex enough? Add in a requirement to merge in data from a third-party video service to compensate for incomplete data.