Using Drupal as a server application user front-end (feasability question) 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.
Absolutely.

Do not be put off by the 'CMS' label, Drupal is actually quite a framework in itself.  Drupal really does a good job for small to mid-sized applications, as the application gets larger though one has to tweak and push the limit a bit more. To be fair, this is true of most any PHP application. 

I have built quite a few applications myself that leverage the power of Drupal, some internal, some public: production management, calendaring applications, rental/item reservation for 4000 items +, mailing list management, (and more).

In my (very humble) opinion, Drupal saves a lot of time, especially for the 'user-management' aspect of application building. As a bonus, you have the rest of the framework to play with when developping your app.

Hope that helps, happy coding, good-luck!