design patterns

In this blog post I try to list the sequence of steps Drupal 5 takes to process an HTTP request. I have not seen it all put together in any one place. I do, however, believe that understanding the request life-cycle is crucial to grasping how a web-system works, so I hope this post will be useful to some people.

Drupal 5 uses a mechanism it calls Bootstrapping, to process an HTTP request. It is so complex that a book can easily be written about it, but that is obviously not my purpose. Therefore, I try to be laconic and concentrate on making the "diagram" rather expressive than detailed.

Disclaimer: inline comments from Drupal source code were used to compile this text.