services

I am now batting nodes, complete with imagefield, between separate instances of Drupal with merriment and glee. For yes, I do have a working beta of Content distribution.

I'm about to quickly write a service to get CCK's content_fields() array from the remote, distributing site, so that the retrieving site can show a UI of possible values for a Views nodereference argument. Try it. It all makes sense once you do.

Quick post this evening, because I'm stopping for the day. Just a troubleshooting tip for web services. We use the excellent Drupal Services module quite a lot for integration work. Take a look, if you don't know it:
http://drupal.org/project/services

Anyway, we always switch on the full security options, which are great for securing the API but stacked full of nasty gotchas. I had a new one today and I thought I'd share.

Part of building an authentication token for the Drupal Services module is adding in a timestamp. The code we normally use looks like this:

<?php

So, you want to create an SOA-based infrastructure for some or all of your business tools and web sites? Not sure where to start?

I'll admit I have worked a little with Microsoft web services, but I am fairly ignorant of the open source alternatives out there for SOA. What I can tell you is I'm hugely impressed with the new Services module for Drupal. It is still in dev, but it's pretty cool!