Bachelor thesis finished!

Finally, my bachelor thesis has come to an end! I now have a very strong feeling of relief (because I managed to finish it in time!) and accomplishment (because it wasn’t always trivial to see the ligt at the end…). Now I can start studying for my upcoming exams, of which there are fortunately only two!

For those who don’t know yet, there are basically three big components:

1. Drupal Episodes module
2. the daemon, which performs the discovery, processing and syncing of files (it still doesn’t have a proper name — your suggestions are welcome!)
3. Drupal CDN integration module

For more information, I’d like to refer you to the bachelor thesis text draft that I’ve attached to this blog post and possibly even to the blog post in which I announced what my bachelor thesis would be about.

I’m aware that I’ve failed to communicate more often about the steps along the way. The reason is simple: my bachelor thesis is bigger than the average one to say the least and therefor I really needed all the time I could find (the countless nights that I worked past 2AM might also be good indicators). Writing a blog post easily costs me at least an hour every time.
I will write a series of blog posts in the weeks after my exam period though, about the most interesting parts. They’ll be mostly on the design of the daemon and its interesting aspects, so they may not sparkle the interest of every Drupal developer. It’s a very different from the Drupal world. Oh and … I reused parts of Django inside the daemon!

To get a quick glimpse of the functionality incorporated into my work, I’ve written down the list of used technologies here:

• Languages
  • PHP
  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • SQL
• Frameworks
  • Drupal (Forms API, Batch API, menu system, Schema API, etc.)
  • jQuery
  • Episodes
  • Django’s Storage class and its dependencies
• APIs/libraries
  • Browser.php
  • Google Chart API
  • FSEvents (through the Python-Objective-C bridge)
  • inotify (through the Python pyinotify module)
  • SQLite (through the Python sqlite3 module and the PHP PDO database abstraction layer)
  • django-storages
  • cssutils
• Uses the following 3rd party applications
  • ImageMagick
  • pngcrush
  • jpegtran
  • gifsicle
  • YUI Compressor
• Supports the following storage systems
  • FTP (via django-storages, through the Python ftplib module)
  • Amazon S3 (via django-storages, through the Python boto module)
  • Amazon CloudFront (via django-storages, through the Python boto module)
• Integrates with the following applications
  • Apache HTTP server

Simultaneously with publishing this blog post, I’m sending out e-mails to the companies that contacted me to test my work. They’ll either test just the daemon or the whole suite. I’d like to take the time here to thank all of them in advance (in chronological order, i.e. when they contacted me or I them to participate in testing):

• SimpleCDN: CDN (San Jose, California, U.S.A.)
• EdgeCast: CDN (Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.)
• NowPublic: Drupal web site (Vancouver, Canada)
• TechConnect: Drupal web sites (Sittard, The Netherlands)
• Development Seed: Drupal shop (Washington D.C., U.S.A.)
• WorkHabit: Drupal shop, CDN broker (Sacramento, California, U.S.A.)
• Rambla: CDN (Antwerp, Belgium)

Thanks!

P.S.: I’m not accepting any more testers for now, to ensure that I have enough time to communicate with these