Progressive Decoupling: How US Courts added headless D8/Angular to D7

Natalie Beneventi, Web Operations Coordiator, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts
and Kevin McCulloch, Lead Developer/DevOps Engineer, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts/New Target

The Administrative Office of the United States Courts is an agency within the judicial branch that provides a broad range of legislative, legal, financial, technology, management, administrative, and program support services to federal courts.

One of our web projects is the judiciary’s internal website, JNet. JNet is a primary information resource for Judiciary employees and is accessed more than 2.5 million times each year. The site offers news, policy, program-related information, and a variety of reference tools, and serves as a gateway to systems used judiciary-wide.

JNet was first our Drupal 7 project and the code base has become large and unwieldy over time. When our web team was asked to add a complex feature to JNet that would promote training opportunities and accept applications for the entire Judiciary, we were faced with a choice: expand our Drupal 7 code to handle user-submitted content outside of our pre-existing publishing workflow, or build a separate web app for application handling and host it on JNet?

We opted for the latter. We built a single-page web app, using headless Drupal 8/JSONApi as the back end and Angular as the front end, and integrated it with JNet. In this session, we will discuss our project requirements and decision-making process, and then explain how we addressed various technical challenges, such as passing the authentication context from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 in order to avoid an extra login step for our users. As a bonus, come hear how a swift community response to a security issue helped persuade our IT Security Office of the value of open source software.

• This presentation will interest technical decision-makers and developers interested in progressive decoupling, headless Drupal, and Angular.
• For the technical part of the talk, attendees should have intermediate to advanced knowledge working with the Drupal back end.
• Attendees will walk away having seen a solution for creating an interactive feature site designed for authenticated user access by integrating a D7 intranet site with a headless D8/Angular Service.