Role of Drupal in Next Generation web

Role of Drupal in Next Generation web

In the era of digital innovation, web technologies play an important role. There are following technologies which are part of next-generation web development:

  • Emerging markup languages – HTML5
  • Mobile web technologies and Progressive Web Apps
  • Social web technologies
  • Real-time web applications
  • Improved Online customer support like chatbots
  • Improved Javascript like Google AMP

With this advance technology features other essential things required for today’s web development are security, easy to manage, rich user interface.

Drupal as a web application content management framework is playing major role in the web application development. It enables Drupal web developers and marketers to create and manage great web, mobile and social experiences. Drupal is used by government and intergovernmental organizations in more then 150 countries. 71 percent of top 100 universities including Stanford, MIT, Oxford University etc, 73 percent of the top 30 media and publishing companies including Walt Disney, Time etc. uses Drupal for their digital platform. Drupal provides a good foundation to enable organizations for delivering better data-driven mobile, web and social experiences.

Drupal provides different modules to integrate HTML5 based templates, that can be easily integrate to allow user to manage content dynamically from the administrative user interface.

As a next generation web requirement user’s expectations are being pushed in direction to be able to interact with sites and content not by clicking a link or refreshing the page but reflect those changes directly to them just like the real time interactive application. To meet these requirement Drupal can be integrate with Node JS and other JavaScript framework which provide real time experience to the user. There are various modules which allow Drupal to provide real time capabilities like push notification, chat, polling etc. These module relies on the NodeJs server that maintain open connection with the user device for the real time communication.

Drupal contributed modules integrated with different API’s allow web application to provide improved online customer support, which worked on concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that can simulate a conversation (or a chat) with a user in natural language. There are various chatbot module available powered by Drupal open-source community.

Drupal supports responsive design best practices and it ensures that users get consistent and great content experience on different type of devices. Also there are modules available to manage progressive web app just like the mobile native app and offline content viewing using single website, no need to manage different web app for different devices. PWA can be downloaded directly from the browser without going to any app store as there are option available “Add To Home” which create app icon on the user device and it works like normal mobile app on device. Also there are modules available which allow integration of Improved Javascript framework like google AMP.

As per the requirement of the next-generation web application latest version of Drupal (Drupal 8) is integrated with Symphony framework, which supports Object Oriented Programming (OOPS) concepts and many other advance features like improved code security, Twig Template (PHP Based Compiled templating engine), fast content rendering and caching. Drupal has a Dedicated Security Team, which fixes security issues and publishes advisories that explain vulnerabilities, along with steps to mitigate them. Drupal updates its security features in the interval of 30 Days.

Drupal founder has setup Acquia Labs to focus on research and development around the future of user engagement on the web. Also Drupal has a large community of developers which striving to make it better. Drupal community comprised more than 1.3 million members, including 112,500 users actively contributing. The next goal of Drupal to find solution for browser less user experience, text-to-voice accessibility, machine learning.