I’ve alluded to it before, but now it’s also been officially approved: I’ll be doing my bachelor thesis on Drupal! I will focus on integrating Drupal with CDNs. Yay! :)

Don’t know what a CDN is? It’s short for Content Delivery Network; a network of (static file or streaming media) servers that are located around the globe. These servers all mirror each others’ files. When a user requests a certain file from the CDN, the server that is the closest to the user will serve the file.
By using a CDN to serve the static components on your web site (CSS, JS, images, fonts), your web site will load much faster: the latency will be lower and the throughput will be greater.

You’d think that the tools necessary to synchronize files to a CDN are already available. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The most important reason is that CDNs have only become cheaper very recently. Most CDNs assume that they are going to be used for the distribution of big files, and therefore a manual upload — typically via (S)FTP — of each file is acceptable. It’s not acceptable for dynamic (Drupal) web sites though!

I will take the CDN integration module that I wrote, extract the useful pieces and then rewrite it properly (i.e. actually scalable) for Drupal 6. Not only is the goal to write a scalable Drupal module (i.e. synchronization through PHP), but also to create a daemon. This daemon (in C++/Qt) will allow for far more efficient synchronization, because you don’t have to scan directories recursively for new and changed files anymore, you can take advantage of file system event monitors (inotify on Linux, FSEvents on Mac OS X and WMI on Windows) to track files without creating overhead.

Interested? For all details (the above really is just an extract), see my proposal (English, 5 pages) at the bottom of this blog post.

My promotor will be Prof. dr. Wim Lamotte and I will be guided by Stijn Agten and Maarten Wijnants.

Officially, I’ll be able to start working on this in February, all the way through July, for about 50% of my time. However, I may start doing some parts of the necessary research, development and potential Drupal core patches sooner, as time permits. Yes, core patches are possible, and even encouraged, because my promotor and guides don’t know Drupal themselves. They’ll exploit Drupal’s peer review process to evaluate my patches.
I’d like to avoid duplicate work, competition is not very useful in this area. Peer review and collaboration are. People who were planning to work on this or who would like to give their input, let me know. I’m sure we’ll be able to arrange something.

Finally, I’d like to thank Dries for doing a review of my proposal. It resulted in several clarifications.

Note: this daemon would of course be independent from Drupal, and therefore it could be reused for other CMSes (WordPress, Joomla, Plone, you name it) or even custom sites.