How Drupal 8 SDK Handle Communication Between Drupal Site and Native Apps?

The usage of Smartphones and tablets is increasing at a breakneck speed, and thus responsive design is becoming the most important web design trend. Many website owners today uses content management systems to build their site as well as web applications. There are several CMS's that are widely used for developing web solutions, but Drupal best fit the need to build mobile development solutions. In fact, Drupal can be utilized as a back-end datasource for mobile app development. While Drupal as the back-end framework can consist of your business logic, search functionality, content etc., on the other hand, your native applications can serve as a front end that communicates to your Drupal site with help of the services module.

Introducing Drupal 8 SDK

You may wonder why you should consider creating a native app rather than mobile web applications. The answer to this is pretty simple, a native application provide advantages over web apps like allowing distribution via app stores and in-app purchases and subscriptions via several app stores and so on. So, if you have decided to build a native app and want your Drupal site to integrate with the developed apps, then there's good news for you.

Wondering what?

The good news is: at the recent Drupal Conference held in Austin, the highly renowned mobile and web development company Lemberg has unveiled a native Drupal 8 SDK. The SDK is mainly developed to help developers to take care of the communication between a native mobile application and a Drupal site easily.

However, the software development kit currently allows integration of Drupal site with native iOS and Android apps only.

What Tasks will Drupal 8 SDK Perform?

Let's have a glimpse of the tasks that the Drupal 8 SDK can handle:

Will help to acquire data from the Drupal CMS quickly, without the need to set up HTTP client, information storage and parsers.

Will help manage the data present within the CMS using simple API calls like add or edit or delete.

A few other features that will be soon introduced are:

Introducing data caching to add support for offline mode.

Downloading data (like background data) updates automatically.

To add background image loading capability.

You can access the newly introduced software development kit from github under the MIT license. You can even use the already existing alternative to Lemberg's Drupal 8 SDK, but it is only available for the iOS platform, called the Drupal iOS Software Development Kit.

Summary

The process of native app development and the Drupal CMS are becoming more refined, as the need to communicate to website or web servers via mobile app is growing. However, this requires integration of your Drupal site with the native applications, which is now possible thanks to the introduction of Drupal 8 SDK by the Lemberg company. This kit will help developers to allow communication between native iOS app and Android app with a Drupal website. Lastly, the Windows Phone SDK is expected to be introduced soon.

Victoria Brinsley is a writer who works for a leading mobile application development services; Appsted. You can also contact, if you are looking forward to hire mobile app developers from India.