I am asking because I have seen people say online along the lines of "joomla sucks because making a web app using joomla is hard due to poor API/architecture/docs/people on my lawn". Then these people talk about switching to drupal, ExpressionEngine or some other allegedly more webapp-friendly system.
So, I thought about the following (naively, perhaps) straightforward approach to making a joomla based webapp of arbitrary complexity and power. First I write my app as a standalone php script. I identify all of the distinct pages/forms I have in it and I create corresponding "articles" in joomla. So maybe if I am making a "forum" webapp I would have a topic list "article", topic "article" and edit post "article". Now, instead of having these articles be relatively static pieces of text in joomla database editable by joomla's logic, I have my separate php script (the actual web app) directly output whatever html (or text, or smarty - whichever abstraction level is best) into the corresponding article text record inside joomla's database. Naturally, if there is a button called "submit" in that page, it would submit not to joomla but rather to my script, most likely via ajax, and then reload the (joomla) page which by that time will have already been updated by my script.
So in a sense I have just gotten rid of the whole notion of "content" in joomla's CMS functionality and instead turned joomla into a shell or wrapper that displays pages from my script. Meanwhile I retain joomla's themes, nice admin panel, user management, media support, custom extensions etc.
Ok, so so much for the n00b theory. Now, would anybody like to burst my bubble? Is there a good reason why people don't do it like that? Or shouldn't do it like that? Or is this in fact one of the well known ways of turning a CMS into a web app?
