[support] Can we make Drupal to use or display data from external application ?

[Osvaldo Suarez]

Hi:
> Here I will explain the case:
> We have a perl based application which has all the business logic and data
> into it. Can we make drupal to interact with it ? And get data chunks out of
> it, display it inside Drupal.
>
> i.e. we will require to see various reports generated by perl application on
> that data inside Drupal.
>
> What I can think of is,
> - we can include IFRAME inside drupal pages or blocks.
> - Make some web services so that Drupal can access it as a web service
> client. But it seems very difficult to do.
>
> Any other idea other than above so that we can use external application's(in
> our case it's perl) data into Drupal.
A while ago I did something like that. Using an import/export module,
I was able to write a perl script which generate an xml file suitable
for importing the data into drupal nodes (including of course, the
proper taxonomies for each one).
If you want your drupal site to interact with the perl base
application, then services should be the way to go. Something like
this comes to my mind: http://drupal.org/project/services
Good luck and tell us how it went (i'm a big fan of perl, it's a shame
it didn't have a nice cms like drupal ;)
Regards
Osvaldo