Using Drupal with external data sources

SESSION OVERVIEW
Need to integrate Drupal with data from a legacy system? Want to migrate 100,000 articles into Drupal without batch imports? Trying to display search results from a 10,000,000 part catalog warehoused in Oracle?

This session will cover mechanisms for integrating external data into your Drupal-poweed site. There will be live demonstrations of working code, and we will walk through some code examples.

TRACK
site building

AGENDA
* Drupal is a platform, and includes tools for managing external data.
** caching to reduce network latency
** drupalhttprequest() to fetch data
** drupal_execute() to process forms programatically
* Using Drupal menu callbacks with structured data sources.
* Using Drupal with external APIs and RESTful interfaces.
* Using Drupal with multiple database connections.
* Using Yahoo! data on your Drupal site.
* MAPLight modules
** Job queue module
** Import manager module
** Running imports with drupal.sh
* Data Scraping and Auditing Example
* Data Enrichment Example

GOALS
This session should help you plan to migrate or integrate external data sources with your Drupal site.

RESOURCES
This is a developer discussion that assumes familiarity with PHP and SQL. It does not assume prior Drupal experience.

You can get a head start by looking at the code samples at http://therickards.com/api/DrupalCON.