development

Web services outputting JSON has become quite common these days; however, consuming such delicious data was not possible purely in JavaScipt because of the same origin/domain policy. Not anymore. As of jQuery 1.2, loading JSON from a different domain is possible.

Attaining performance and scalability in a large Drupal site requires a good amount of time and effort. In addition, speed gains become smaller and smaller after more and more work is spent. Eventually, the exercise becomes futile.

On the other end of this optimization, you can do a few things to a small Drupal site from nothing at all and considerably decrease load times; also, (almost) no coding is required.

Here are a handful suggestions that will help almost any Drupal site and they are easy to do.

Before I get to the meat of the subject, let me provide some background information that lead to the Trac importer module for activeCollab.

Last month, the company I work for, Work at Play, implemented some changes. The big part of this is re-branding. The other is modification to system infrastructure. Trac, which is a component of this system, is being used as a ticketing tool, as well as some sort of a time tracking device. After a year and a half of usage and 30 separate instances (one for each project), it was time to change Trac to something that can scale with our requirements. Enter activeCollab. Why activeCollab? Because it’s awesome. It also replaces our BaseCamp instance for collaboration and project management needs.

The change requires to export all data from Trac and import it to activeCollab. This includes users, tickets, comments, attachments, milestones, and time records. My initial approach was to use activeCollab’s web service API, but the control over data attributes was limited. So, I’ve decided to create the activeCollab module, tracimporter.