It is no secret that Drupal struggles with performance, especially for larger websites that generate a lot of traffic and contain even more data. Our clients on the other hand, are very satisfied with Drupal as a content management system. To provide a power blasting front-end with a user friendly Drupal Back-end, we found the perfect solution in Phalcon.

Phalcon has a C extension installed as Apache module which makes it the self titled 'fastest PHP Framework'. After building our first application in Phalcon, I was very satisfied by its fast page loads and overall performance. This brought up the idea to use Phalcon as front-end without ditching the Drupal we love.

This session will cover a "Case Study" of how we implemented Phalcon with Drupal. The basic techniques have been described within a reading covered on Github, using JSON as a caching layer to serve our Drupal content.

The following subjects will be covered within this technically-orientated session:

• Case Study introduction (website will be live by July/August)
• Code implementation (Drupal/Phalcon project setup)
• What stays in Drupal, what doesn't?
• Phalcon routing based on your Drupal content hooks
• Using services with oAuth for CUD methods

I would advise you to finish my reading so you're ready & set to go. The outcome of this session will be a better understanding of why other solutions, besides Drupal, will improve your application. After 4 years of Drupal experience I'm pretty confident that we should keep an open mind, especially when it comes to bigger, scalable applications!