There's a module for that! Drupal architecture and module development

Web applications are changing. Whereas most of the processing used to happen on the server, the current generation of browsers is capable of performing non-trivial tasks via the increasingly powerful HTML5 + JavaScript environment. Drupal, however, is still a server-heavy platform where JavaScript is used mostly as user interface candy.

Earlier this year, I talked about the value of monitoring Twitter to extract valuable data. About a month ago, we finally decided to go ahead and build our application based on this concept. The core idea is pretty simple: people use the #reco hashtag to recommend things or ask for recommendations on Twitter.

Originally published at OpenCraft

Using the CCK + Views platform, we can replicate the traditional ER (Entity-Relationship) framework into a rapid application development environment that minimizes procedural and SQL programming by replacing most of it with "Visual ER programming": a way to specify data model and behaviour in terms of SQL-like abstractions directly inside the runtime Drupal environment - and reaping the benefits of incremental, always functional output.

ER Modeling

ER modeling deals with defining entities and relations among them.