After about a year full of work around Drupal 7, Rules & Web services I recently graduated my master studies "Information & Knowledge Management" at the Vienna University of Technology. As finally my thesis will be presented officially with others at this year's epilog, I thought it would be a good time to share my thesis to the public.
The thesis title is "Event-Condition-Action rules for distributed content management", thus I've worked on a re-architectured version of Rules that is able to work across system boundaries, e.g. multiple Drupal installations. That resulted in Rules 2.0 as well as stuff like the Entity API being created - but better, it finally made it possible for me to fully concentrate on working on Drupal - awesome!
Thesis abstract: For the popular open source Content Management System (CMS) Drupal the Rules extension module makes it feasible for users to configure reactions on a high level without requiring any programming expertise. To achieve that, the extension allows for the specification of reactive rules - or more precisely it leverages Event-Condition- Action rules, for which the actions are executed when a specified event occurs and the conditions are met. Finally the ability to create custom reactions constitutes an opportunity for users to rapidly adapt the behavior of Drupal based web applications. In this thesis the existing Rules extension module is analyzed and revised in order to obtain an extensible and reusable solution, for which all identified flaws have been eliminated. Moreover the module is advanced to work across system boundaries, such that it can be utilized for the rule-based invocation of web services as well as for reacting on remotely occurring events. Therefore the solution obtains the ability to work with arbitrary data structures with the help of metadata, so that the data of remote systems can be seamlessly integrated based on metadata. Building upon this capability we present the rule-based utilization of RESTful and WS* web services and introduce Rules web hooks - a novel approach for the interaction of Drupal based web applications that exploits reaction rules to enable custom near-instant reactions on remotely occurring events.
Get the full-text of the thesis at https://wolfgangziegler.net/thesis. At this point, let me thank my employer epiqo for sponsoring this work, as well as my academic advisors O.Univ.Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr.techn. A Min Tjoa and Mag. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Amin Anjomshoaa of the Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, who already did a great job supporting the Drupalcamp Vienna 2009.