I am very new to Drupal. I am currently watching videos and reading many online tutorials. I came to Drupal, because I understand it is a good CMS system (at least recommended by many, and the more I learn, the more I agree).
But, the more I learn, the more I am wondering whether it could solve another of my needs: acting as a user front-end for a server-side application. Let me describe this.
I have a couple of experts entering technical information in a system (i.e. database). I understand I can create specific screens with specific fields in Drupal (that's great, no coding) and that it would be stored in the database when ready.
After information is entered by experts, heavy time and cpu consuming asynchronous processes should be started in background and resulting information stored in the database.
Next, users should be able to read results with another screen in Drupal.
Instead of performing the heavy processes on the web-server, I was wondering whether I could use another server to connect to the drupal database instance (with a deamon application written in Java for example), perform the heavy duty tasks, and store the information in that same database.
My questions are:
Is this realistic? Has anyone attempted this?
Is it easy for a 3rd party application to read data from a Drupal database and store results in it? Does Drupal offer specific modules faciliting this? Any documentation or tips available?
Thanks.