DrupalCon 2019 session: Decoupled Drupal Commerce with React Native

Upgrade to Drupal 9

As usual the confernce started with the Driesnote. An important topic was upgrading to Drupal 8 and eventually to Drupal 9. Many users are afraid of upgrading to Drupal 8, because the upgrade to Drupal 9 has already been announced.

Dries explained really well, that after upgrading to Drupal 8 the upgrade to Drupal 9 will be easy. It does not require another migration and will most likely not contain breaking changes for Drupal websites that have all recent updates installed. You can checkout the Driesnote starting at 1:09.

Decoupled at its best

The day before DrupalCon started several summits took place. Among them also the decoupled summit. Being one of the most active companies in this space we were invited to participate in the Q&A of business and tech leaders during the summit. 

Throughout the conference decoupled frontends were an ongoing topic.

Drupal is getting a lot of attention from large companies for its capabilities in this field. Since Drupal supports both JSON:API and GraphQL it has become really easy to build fully decoupled frontends or implement hybrid websites.

In this field Drupal has a real advantage over other decoupled backends: In addition to exposing data with standard REST it has all the functions of an enterprise CMS system (strong API for extension and integration in other systems, enterprise grade editing with advanced permissions and workflows, etc.). 

Since everything at DrupalCon is very open we could speak with many other companies that are active with decoupled applications. It was nice to confirm, that for many websites hybrid approaches are preferred over fully decoupling. In a hybrid approach (aka progressing decoupling) only parts of a website are built with decoupled technologies (such as React).

Example: Interactive components of a website that require a lot of communication with the host (for example an interactive map) could be built with React, while the rest of the website (the static content) could be built with coupled Drupal (Twig).

Other hot topics

Other topics that we work a lot on at 1xINTERNET are

• Drupal 8 Distributions
• Design Systems, Component Based Design, and Patternlab
• Personalisation
• E-Commerce
• Integration with Marketing Automation software

There were interesting sessions on all topics and we had lots of good conversations with other companies such as ImageX, Phase2, Centarro (former CommerceGuys), and many more. It is always great to have the opportunity to discuss your ideas with others and seeing how they approach them.

Decoupled Drupal Commerce with React Native

For me personally a highlight was my session about Decoupled Drupal Commerce with React Native. The session was on a big stage and a lot of people came to listen and we had a lively discussion in the Q&A and after the session.

Below are the slides of the session. You can also view the presentation in Google Slides.