Using web services in Drupal

With web services, we can take our Drupal content and share this content with other web applications and. Drupal\'s codebase is PHP-based and many of the popular web applications being used today, including Wordpress,  Joomla!, and Flickr, are also PHP-based. So we have a common programming language we can work with and use to integrate these applications.

 Taking an example, lets say your Human Resources Department wants to integrate its job postings and applications with another web application. Web services can allow this to happen. Your office\'s payroll department may want to connect to its bank account in order to pass data from the payroll reports over to its bank reporting mechanism. Web services can allow this to happen. You may want to take all of the photos you upload to your Drupal site in image galleries built with the Views module, and take these photos and send them to some web site so that they automatically show up in your account. Web services can make this happen.

This leads to another advantage of using web services with Drupal and why we would choose to use Drupal in the first place. Instead of having to upload our photos twice—once to our Drupal site and then repeating the procedure to our web site—web services allows us to upload the images to our Drupal site once and then automatically send that data over without having to upload one again. It saves us time and speeds up the entire process of generating web-based content.

Additionally, there may be applications we want to use in our Drupal site, for example applications where we want to consume content without having to code again. We can just reuse these applications using the web services protocols and get this application content into our Drupal site. So we can consume web services. Examples of this would be converting currency on our site, feeding weather reports and other weather data into our site, feeding natural disaster scientific data into our site from services that provide it, feeding language translation services, feeding music podcasts, and more. Instead of having to reprogram this type of content, we can grab it from another web application and show it automatically on our site using web services.

Simply put, this opens up a method of easily sharing data and content resources between applications and machines that are running on different platforms and architecture. We have opened up a gold mine of capabilities here because we can talk to applications that run different software from our Drupal site and on different computing platforms.