Decoupled Drupal is now a fixture of the Drupal community and ecosystem, but it has roots in key software concepts like the separation of concerns. Today, decoupled Drupal is commonplace across the Drupal world, not only at the highest echelons of enterprise implementations of Drupal, but also among smaller consultancies beginning to get their feet wet with headless CMS architecture.

From the early days of Drupal's remarkably prescient web services, to the adoption of the JSON:API specification in Drupal core, to the ongoing innovation surrounding GraphQL in Drupal and the Decoupled Menu Initiative, how far have we come? How has decoupled Drupal evolved over the years, what makes it such a compelling architectural paradigm in light of the emerging distributed CMS trend, and why is it still in vogue?

In part 2 of our series on decoupled Drupal, Preston So, the author of Decoupled Drupal in Practice (2018), co-originator of the term progressive decoupling, and Tag1 Consulting's Editor in Chief and Michael Meyers, Managing Director at Tag1, in this discussion of decoupled Drupal’s history and future, and the hows and whys of using decoupled Drupal.