Building Realtime Applications with Drupal and Node.js

Call it the "appification" of the web. Users' expectations are being pushed in the direction of being able to interact with sites and content not by clicking a link or refreshing the page but by having those changes come directly to them. Think Google Mail or Facebook or Twitter, updates that engage the user when they happen rather than waiting for them to have to keep checking back. With Drupal 8 having a first class REST interface a world of opportunities open up. Unfortunately PHP isn't always the best language for this sort of behavior. But we live in a polyglot world, and Node.js is perfect for this sort of work. In this session you'll learn how to connect a Node application to Drupal to allow updates to be seen when they happen. We'll be using Drupal, AngularJS and Sails.js to demonstrate the capabilities of both Javascript and Node to build interactive applications and synchronize with Drupal through the REST interface to serve as the data repository.