Drupal an Enterprise ready solution
Amid all the hype and momentum that is building around adoption of Drupal for sites of all sizes, there remains a bitter skepticism that Drupal is, or ever will be appropriate for large deployments in Enterprise environments. This year’s attendance and presentations at DrupalCon Paris 2009 should put many of those doubts to rest, as flagship publishers like Economist.com and consultancies with Enterprise clients, open up about what they’ve achieved with Drupal.
The presentation schedule has interleaved content for newcomers to Drupal as well as seasoned coders, with business focussed discussions on introducing and managing Drupal within the productive flow of large organisations. There has been a significant emphasis on the use of Agile techniques, specifically with Scrum.
Within Drupal 7 there are a number of new features and tools that are aimed specifically for larger sites with performance challenges. New deployment APIs, extended debugging and unit testing tools and exciting changes to caching and database replication tools are all part of the new bag of tricks for Enterprise developers.
In talking to some of the teams from larger sites, a common toolkit is emerging for supporting rigorous development processes. Most of these tools focus on an Agile approach to development, emphasizing constant quality review and a frequent need to integrate and deploy. Recipes for success include:
- Hudson for Continuous Integration
- ANT for deployment scripting
- JMeter for performance testing
- Selenium and Selenium Grid for functional testing