Drupal App Standard - Open For Business

Today, SubHub and Phase2 Technology announced the release of a new joint initiative, the Open App Standard. 

The Open App Standard is a collective effort that documents a set of defintions and standards for any Drupal product or distribution that wishes to solve end-user problems with Apps.

You can find our press release on the Open App Standard Initiative here.

An App solves a concrete, task-specific use case in a polished, “user friendly” way.

The high level objectives for the Open App Standard are:

• Open up the definition and development so best practices are used and duplication is avoided
• Lower development times involved in producing Apps and App Marketplaces (i.e. the end user interface that allows discovery and installation of Apps)
• Achieve interoperability of Apps across Drupal products and distributions
• Provide more incentives for developers to switch to Drupal as a platform for solving consumer problems

Background

In June this year we launched the latest version of our website platform on SubHub.com, which was built using Drupal 7. As our target user is mostly non-technical, we'd worked especially hard on providing a simple interface to allow our end users to install additional features (Apps) themselves through our App Store.  

We think Apps are the perfect way to provide end users with complete solutions to small well focused problems, in a way that is simple and intuitive - e.g. plugging in analytics from your preferred vendor or integrating a Facebook comments stream on certain articles.  

So, we were pretty excited when Acquia's Robert Douglass suggested that we should talk to Phase 2 - as they had also released a Drupal product with an App Marketplace, OpenPublic - and that there could be some benefit in sharing what we'd learned.

Talking Shop With Phase 2

What followed was a great example of why Open Source is such a healthy way to approach software development and also why the Drupal community makes Drupal more than just another web development platform.

Through a series of conference calls, often spanning five timezones and miraculously pulled together by Phase2's Karen Borchet, we quickly all agreed on what 'Apps' were, what they should do and how they would do it.

It was a great relief to find out that Phase2 and SubHub had come at the problem with the same vision but from different directions, so there wouldn't be any wasted effort thus far.

Phase2 had focused on delivery of apps and solving the problem of module dependency, while SubHub had focused on end user experience and monetization. This made sense from a business point of view as SubHub is a SaaS platform and Phase2's OpenPublic is a distribution.

Fortunately, our paths crossed at just the right time (thanks Robert!) to allow both companies to focus on building the best solution and it could be argued that had we been using a different platform they may never have crossed at all. We hope our work so far and our approach will save you time and effort!

So, if you're thinking about solving your end user problems with Apps, head over to the Open App Standard Drupal groups page to find out more.

If you're coming to DrupalCon London 2011, SubHub will be on table #13 and Phase2, by beautiful co-incidence, will be next door to us. Come and say hello!

Cheers,

Dan