For years, front-enders have had an uneasy alliance at best with Drupal, but with the advent of client side Javascript MVC frameworks, the idea of building decoupled/headless Drupal sites has attracted increased interest from all over the community, promising to deliver that ever-elusive unicorn: true and complete control of the presentation layer. Its rapid growth throughout the larger web development universe shows that it is a serious trend to be reckoned with, and a significant indicator of the future of our industry.

But such systems present new difficulties and challenge historical ideals of a monolithic, do-it-all end-to-end CMS solution. Under the decoupled model, our long-held gospel of Drupal's power and flexibility strains to the point of breaking as feature after touted feature falls away -- layout admin tools, contextual information, modules extending or controlling the display of content elements. What does this mean for the engineers (both front and back end), the administrators, and most importantly, the users of such systems?

This session will discuss the following questions:

• What does it mean to build truly decoupled apps? How does this fundamentally change the way Drupal sites are architected, developed, and most importantly used?
• What do we gain by building such systems? More importantly, what do we lose?
• Is Drupal well-suited for such headless systems? Where does it fall short? What does Drupal need to change, and where, to accommodate these uses?
• Lastly, and most importantly, what does the Drupal community risk by not embracing this use case and engaging the greater development community pushing it forward?

(This talk was borne from a number of conversations at Drupalcon Austin which led to the formation of the Headless Drupal Working Group)