What is Decoupling?

Decoupling has been gaining momentum in the past couple years. An increasing number of websites and applications combine their content management system’s backend and editorial capabilities with a separate framework that renders the front end. 

The idea is to make data available in a different format (usually JSON) so the framework can parse it, and so the developer can take full control of the markup, UI, routing, etc. While it’s not ideal for certain types of sites (if you have a lot of pages for instance), it becomes very handy when dealing with single page applications or projects that require a lot of user interaction.

I recently attended Decoupled Dev Days in New York City. This two day event was a way to gather a small portion of the Drupal community (and others) for an in-depth look at the work many people are putting toward making Drupal an attractive backend for a decoupled app. Guest speakers were also main contributors for Angular.js and Ember.js, which was beneficial; the goal was not to make another Drupal centric conference, but rather to attract a broader audience within the tech community.

It was a great opportunity to see the community at work and to get insights about implementation, performance, tools, and more while working on a decoupled app myself.

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