There's been a lot written about API design, it's probably not surprising there are several books written about the subject. It also seems like nearly every cloud-based service provides an API to allow access to your data. In this tutorial, we'll attempt to condense this information and answer the following questions:

• Are there different types of API paradigms?
• What kinds of considerations do we need to make when building an API for our decoupled site?
• And, what's this REST thing everyone is talking about?

Let's dig into those questions one at a time.

If you're interested in decoupling Drupal, there's a good chance you've heard at least some of the buzz in the Drupalverse about "headless" or decoupled Drupal. Or perhaps you watched Dries' keynote from DrupalCon Barcelona or read Dries' blog post about the future of decoupled Drupal. Whatever the case may be, this tutorial and the ones that follow will walk you through building a simple decoupled blog. In Dries' terminology the demo site we'll be building is "fully decoupled." While it would be trivial to adopt similar techniques to build a progressively decoupled site, let's dig a bit deeper into what it means to build a decoupled Drupal site.

Andrew Berry, from Lullabot, has written a great article asking Should you Decouple? Like most architectural decisions there are trade-offs to consider with a decoupled approach. Let's take a look at some of the pros and cons of a decoupled approach. Is it the right choice for your project?

At this point, whether we've decided to use a third-party pre-rendering service or we've written our own isomorphic JavaScript application to serve as the front-end of our website, our hosting requirements have definitely gotten more complex. Let's take a look at the continuum of decoupled site architectures and start to come up with a list of things to keep in mind when considering their hosting requirements.

Today's Drupal developer needs more than just a text editor and FTP. Best practice Drupal development involves a suite of tools, processes, and more than one server environment.

This tutorial is directed toward an audience that is not familiar with best practices in Drupal Development and methods involving version control with Git, IDEs, local development environments, and deployment environments (i.e. stage, live). Here we're providing a high-level overview of these topics with links to dive deeper if you need more information.

In this tutorial, we'll cover:

• Introduce Version Control Systems such as Git
• Discuss how Git can be used to deploy to remote web servers
• Review programming-centric text editors and Integrated Development Environments
• Identify the need for a local development environment.
• Explain shared deployment environments including production and stage.

Create a custom module and alter the content on a node page using a hook and existing theme functions.

Identify and use preprocessors by creating a custom breadcrumb trail on a page, and reduce and refactor code in custom modules.

Create a new module for movie imports, which will display a form when the user navigates to a page.

Make SQL queries in Drupal, make HTTP requests to external websites, and use this data to validate a form.

Use a form submit hook to pass information down the form API and create a node programmatically.

Create an image file programmatically and attach a file to a node.

Check and create taxonomy terms programmatically.

Create an install hook to pre-define a list of films to import.

Create a custom Drush command, which makes use of re-usable functions within our Movie Import module.

Create an administration form to save information about how the movie importer works by using variables.

Create a permissions hook to secure access to pages within Drupal.

Learn how to use Features to manage configuration changes and understand the configuration change workflow in a team environment.

Configure basic settings which affect performance, and perform basic analysis to understand what might be affecting website performance.

Use hooks to update the database tables and alter form elements.

Create autocomplete fields and menu hooks.