Decoupled Drupal is a thing for quite a while now. There seem to be two ways of doing it. We either let the Javascript take control and use Drupal only as a data store (fully decoupled) or let Drupal do the heavy lifting and use the front end frameworks to render discrete parts of the site (progressive decoupling). The first option seems to be much more popular now, even despite the fact that it’s expensive and forces us to re-implement a lot of things that Drupal does well. Why is that?

In this session, we'll try to answer this question. We'll start with a brief description of the JavaScript modernization initiative for Drupal core and ways of applying it to contrib and custom code. We'll discuss possible use cases, investigate common problems, and take a closer looks at the available tools. We'll finish up with a concrete example of a progressively decoupled widget.

The session is for developers interested in using the newest front-end trends in their projects without the hassle of going fully decoupled. The examples will use React and GraphQL but no prior knowledge of these tools is required.