Bay Area Drupal Camp

Sometimes we get lucky. Or, that’s how I felt when I found out about the Open Ajax Toolkit (OAT), which has a lot of great components for drawing trees, tables, field types, etc. But, how to get it into Drupal? CCK is a great idea, but if you think in terms of optimization, you first realize that every typo on a form is checked by the server and sent back to the user through a laborious process. And, PHP, while being an amazing language for getting the idea working, is still one of the slowest interpreters available for web server plug-ins. Also, I found that programming any one CCK field type is laborious on it’s own. So, it seemed to be a good idea to take some load off the server and make the OAT a part of the daily Drupal diet. So, I want to tell you how I rolled OAT into Drupal to make a module now dubbed Rolled OATS. And, then I would like to tell you how to make content types with it by utilizing the Rolled OAT Content Kit (ROCK). Then I would like to tell you how you can use it, contribute to it, and potentially profit from it by using the Rolled OAT Repository (ROAR). And, this is not all a joke. There are some nice interactions with taxonomies with fields showing up only for nodes classified by certain terms, panel definitions with drag and drop tools, layouts drawn on the screen, sophisticated and dynamic widgets, hooks for search and display, etc. Of course, I had to go deep into Drupal code and make some carefully placed changes, which I will be happy to relate to you as time permits.