[drupal-devel] Using Drupal as an applications framework?

[Chris Johnson]

1. Executive Summary

I propose to replace my employer's extranet website, which currently uses all 
custom-coding to generate dynamic web pages from database queries and trading 
partner electronic transactions, with one newly built upon Drupal.  Is this a 
good idea?

2. Why Drupal developer might care to help me answer this question

If I undertake to convert our current web applications to Drupal, I believe 
there are some benefits to the Drupal community which may accrue.  They fall 
primarily in three categories:

	a) My employer will pay for me to spend a significant amount of my time 
working directly on Drupal or Drupal-related code.  I expect this may be a 
thousand hours over the next year minimum.  This means I will be paid to work 
on Drupal issues which affect my company, which would include bugs or 
limitations in core or module code.  Fixing bugs is good for the Drupal community.

	b) My employer will need to develop a large amount of custom code to run its 
applications.  Some of that will be very generic code which will be donated 
back to the Drupal community if they so desire it.  For example, almost all of 
our applications involve date input for elements.  I will spend the time 
necessary to perfecting a variety of form elements such as date which others 
in Drupal may wish to use.  (It is also true that much of the code I develop 
with be of no interest or use to anyone else, and/or proprietary.)

	c) My employer currently employees several contract developers full time.  I 
see a big opportunity to hire Drupal developers on contract to help us out 
with this conversion project, and with developing new applications in the 
future (we are constantly developing new software to meet our changing and 
growing business opportunities).


The rest of this message is posted here:  http://drupal.org/node/18124

If you are willing to help me answer the question of whether I should go ahead 
with this project, please respond there.

Thanks,
--
Chris Johnson