Articles

As the organizer of the Drupal User Group in Szeged (Hungary), I’ve been working on a design and distribution package that all Drupal User Groups regardless of language and location could use.

Recently we used PhoneGap and Drupal to build Scoreshare: an Android and iOS app for sharing game scores with fellow fans. In the process we fell in love with Go and learned that PhoneGap was not as robust as we originally thought.

After we launched our first mobile app, Menuboard, we faced a big silence: we saw a few people downloading the application, but we didn't know what they used it for, or if they used it at all. Since the App Store owned the relationship with our users, we didn't even know who was using our product. We learned that any time you create an app you should build in feedback mechanisms that can help you learn about your customers and how you can improve your application.

Because of its limitations, PHP and therefore Drupal can't send notifications to the browser real time. Pinging a URL will be slow (because Drupal has to bootstrap every time), and keeping HTTP connections alive (long polling or COMET) will definitely kill Apache. You have to face this restriction every time a project requires the use of real time notifications, so we’ve come up with a solution.

Thank you for your questions about our previous blog post “Drupal as a front-end for Google Drive”. As promised I’m completing the article with a technical background and some more insight into the development. This post will also help you make your own document management system without writing a single line of code.

Although thanks to today’s technical possibilities most of our project work can be managed remotely, it’s always beneficial to be able to meet other participants in the project and work together in person. For this reason, travelling and working abroad is not unusual for developers at Pronovix.