1. Integrating Drupal with Software Developers Assistance (SDA) Team # 1: Aditya Macherla Arun Gupta Mahankali Shruti Damle Truyen Van Le Vishakha Kadam Instructor: Kwok-Bun Yue Mentor: Abbasi Dhilawala 1

2. Content Introduction Limitations of SDA Why we choose Drupal? System Architecture Challenges and Pros/cons of communication Technique How we are achieving the goals How we are going to implement XML-RPC High level block diagram Future work/ summary Q&A 2

3. Introduction What is Software Developers Assistance? Engineering automation product that guides engineers through their project specific standard, processes and procedures 3

4. Introduction What is Drupal? Open source web content management framework 4

5. Introduction What is the Project? Integrating Drupal with SDA 5

6. Limitations of existing system Inter module communication Has complex and huge modules: intertwined, cannot be separated with Liferay 5.2.3 used by system Current system uses some of them e.g. out of 60 3-5 are used - consumes resources (memory, processor, hardware resources, software resources) Does not have boundaries between organizations Passing parameters to multiple portlets Session management Very difficult to upgrade to the newer versions Does not have clean URL 6

7. Why we choose Drupal? Still on the process of studying the feasibility of whether Drupal can replace LIFERAY? SDA 7

8. Why we choose Drupal? Technical motivations: Drupal can solve the above limitations of LIFERAY: Provide boundaries between organizations Passing parameters to multiple portlets Especially upgrade to new version 8

9. Why we choose Drupal? Technical issues: And more than that, Drupal fulfills other requirements of SDA that LIFERAY can not Support group (Organic group) Time to start and build a module is pretty quick Support Java backend: standardize API - XMLRPC Very highly scalability and load balancing support 9

10. Why we choose Drupal? Non - Technical motivation: Drupal become more popular (Top 3) Big organizations/firms are using Drupal Whitehouse US Department of Commerce Continental Airline and United Airline Merger Intel Tietronix customers (including NASA) are switching to Drupal Drupal – A free open source tools Strong community including paid services 10

11. System Architecture THIS PROJECT EXISTING SYSTEM 11

12. System Architecture  Provide an UI to interact with the system  Include logic to present data to the users  No business or data access logics  PHP/HTML/JS/CSS SDA Presentation - Drupal 12

13. System Architecture  Provide an interface for Drupal to interact with SDA  Drupal plays XMLRPC client  SDA backend plays XMLRPC Server  Web Services – XMLRPC SDA Communications - XMLRPC 13

14. Challenges and Pros/cons of communication Techniques Challenges: The current implementation uses Liferay, which supports Java Drupal is PHP based and thus its integration with the backend Java business layer is a tricky part There are two ways to achieve that: Web Services (XMLRPC) PHP/Java Bridge 14

15. Challenges and Pros/cons of communication Techniques What is XMLRPC? What is PHP/Java Bridge? 15

16. Challenges and Pros/cons of communication Techniques To choose between these two options we came up with some evaluation criteria 16

17. How we are achieving the goals Implement XMLRPC Build custom modules in Drupal to replace the modules in Liferay and act as XMLRPC client Build a custom class on top of SDA’s core modules and act as XMLRPC server 17

18. SDA Communication Module This module will act as a communication layer between back-end SDA and its presentation layer This module resides on top of SDA’s core java modules. This module contains a class called XMLRPCServer.java SDA 18

19. XMLRPCServer.java XMLRPCServer.java contains following three methods: XMLRPCServer GetInitialProcessDetails GetProcessDetails 19

20. High level block diagram Input DB ParentID ChildID Input parameters/ arguments Output SDA View Drupal Module SVG image 1. Color: fill 2. Links 3. Breadcrumb SDA Backend Communications Layer Web services- XMLRPC SVG file 1. Entity 2. Links to other entity 20

21. Explanation: Raw SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files High level block diagram 21

22. The complete SVG image High level block diagram 22

23. Future work/ summary Analyze the possibility, pros and cons, and personnel skills for integration of SDA with Drupal over the current open source CMS like Liferay Implement two SDA modules Lifecycle, My Worklist (J2EE based) in Drupal Write the publication paper More inclined to industrial case study Focus on issues like migration, integration, use of multiple languages, and how to deal with legacy system 23

24. References Tietronix website: www.tietronix.com Drupal community: http://drupal.org Drupal Developer: API http://api.drupal.org XMLRPC standard: http://www.xmlrpc.com/ W3C SVG Working Group: http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/ www.google.com/images 24

25. Q&A 25