CakePHP and Drupal 6 need to talk to each other, but how?

Question

I have a CakePHP app which needs to take data from Drupal (6). Specifically, there is one custom content type and one webform that need to be shared with CakePHP - so when a new node for that content type is added, or a webform submitted, Cake knows about it. I'm not sure the best way to do this, I've come up with two approaches:

1. Having an alternative datasource for the models in question, and read directly from the Drupal database. However, the Drupal tables are in a Drupally format, which I'd rather not write lots of $this->Model->find()s for - it will be a bit of a pain. I don't totally understand where Drupal stores everything, either.
2. Writing some code in Drupal to save the data in a different format in the CakePHP database. I don't know how easy this would be - I'm more up to speed with Cake than Drupal. I guess I'd use hook_form_alter and add a function to the $form[#submit] array?

Does anyone have advice about which of these two would be better, or if there's another option? I'm leaning towards the second idea.

Help greatly appreciated, thanks

Answer 1

I would create a web services API in Drupal, and periodically run a batch job in Cake which hits the API for new data. Try this module: http://drupal.org/project/services

Or, if you need super-concurrent updates, create an API in Cake to receive data, and a module in Drupal which will send data on submission.

This way you don't need to worry about database-level sharing between the two.