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Sebastian Bergmann's Workflow Engine Thesis

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I came across Sebastian Bergmann’s diploma thesis on workflow engines from ~2007. He’s the creator of PHPUnit, the go to testing framework for PHP. His thesis explores the design and implementation of workflow engines, which is fascinating to revisit nearly two decades later considering how a special kind of workflow automation is all the rage nowadays (*cough* AI agents *cough*).

First page of Sebastian Bergmann's diploma thesis on workflow engines showing the title page with the University of Dortmund logo

The thesis implements a workflow engine for PHP based CMS ezPublish. That triggered a lot of nostalgic feeling! Up until ~2013 I was mostly a PHP dev and worked on some projects using ezPublish. I even gave a talk about ezComponents at a BarCamp in Vienna at some point. Poor me ended up in a parallel slot where some guys presented a new unknown tool called nodejs which turned out to be all the rage so in my session there were just around 5 people.