
What’s Kong to Your DRUPAL API : Lesson From Abi
Is your organisation produces and maintains a large quantity of documents, internal and external websites, or perhaps videos? If yes then a content management process will be important for ensuring that content can be collected, delivered, used, maintained, and deleted effectively. Managing content is a key discipline that is not unique to knowledge management, but that is definitely related.
According to a research on Performance Analysis of Content Management Systems done by Dr.V.R.Rathod in 2011, Drupal, as a CMS which allows user to update their web pages without technical knowledge and ensure that it fits your organization’s workflow, is best for web developers to perform critical task and provide most facilities and flexibility in rich web site and also provide good documentation support as well. Drupal is also great for multi- language, shopping cart kind of facility. Drupal is powerful and flexible. In the right hands, you can create unique and effective solutions to meet your needs. The reason Drupal has been successful is because there are always forward-looking changes.
Drupal has went through changes from the first year it launched. On October 7, 2015 Drupal 8 first release candidate (rc1) was announced. Thanks to the Drupal community, Drupal continues to grow. Now many people try to do “headless” or decoupled drupal. In short, with decoupled Drupal, a visitor to the website will not interact with Drupal directly. They will not see a traditional Drupal theme.
With the raise of decoupled approach, Drupal 8 also comes with a strategic initiative which is API First. Making Drupal API First means allowing the power and flexibility of the Drupal that we love available over HTTP APIs. Also, it means making the data stored and managed by Drupal available for other software. In doing so, Drupal 8 will be able to power applications of all kinds from Python and Java to beautifully rendered experiences like Vue and Amber. As long as it speaks HTTP it should works with Drupal.
Besides Drupal, there is a form of middleware between computing clients and your API-based applications called Kong. What Kong does is it extends the features of your APIs easily and consistently. Once Kong is running, every client request being made to the API will hit Kong first and then be proxied to the final API.
The Kong Server, built on top of NGINX (Yes, NGINX!), is the server that will actually process the API requests and execute the configured plugins to provide additional functionalities to the underlying APIs before proxying the request upstream.
Here’s how the two works together :
With Drupal 8 API First, its very easy to do headless Drupal, to use drupal as a web service. Kong, act as a gateway can enhance and extends you APIs with additional functionalities.
Kong also provide authentication plugin, which can replace drupal authentication, so not only it can make drupal lighter, by reducing drupal workload, it also make drupal more flexible because drupal can use any authentication method provided by Kong.The reason why we should start putting Drupal 8 and Kong together is because it provides underlying APIs with additional functionalities, replace Drupal authentication, provide various authentication method and last but not least it reduce Drupal load.
Ultimately, what Drupal is today is a tool for building a content management system. It is a system that facilitates the use of reusable components or customized software for managing web content. It is the framework with which you build your own CMS, to your specifications, to suit your needs. As what Abi suggest about Drupal utilization in the Drupal Camp SG 2018, “Drupal has a steep learning curve, thats why keep learning is the only way to utilize the power and flexibility of Drupal.” That’s why it is important to understand our needs before turning them into an application.

