NetKernel Technologies

NetKernel includes a wide range of tools, services and transports to support your application. As with the rest of NetKernel, all of these capabilities work at the logical level. To use them, simply import their host module and then access them using their logical URI addresses.

This guide is organized principly around core technologies and within each technology area the client tools, services and transports are documented. For example, all of the client tools, services and transports to support HTTP will be located in one section.

Client Tools

Client tools allow programs to call upon external services or protocols as a client (such as in a client-server or peer-to-peer relationship). For example, NetKernel provides client tools for using the HTTP protocol which are useful for making calls to remote web servers. Another example includes the RDBMS client tools useful for accessing an relational database management system.

Services

Services provide the capability to transform or generate resources. Services are very similar in philosophy to the simple task-focused tools provided with Unix operating system. Simple services are readily composed to create powerful resource processing operations.

Even the execution of code is performed using language runtimes which are logically addressed services.

NetKernel provides hundreds of off-the-shelf service-based tools and you can readily extend the set to suit your application.

Transports

A Transport is an adapter that is triggered by an event such as time passing, a process thread waking up, an external protocol handler receiving a request or a GUI event handler thread detecting user activity. When an event occurs the transport interprets the event, constructs a NetKernel request and injects that request as a root request into a NetKernel address space. The module hosting the transport and into which root requests are injected is called a Fulcrum.

A transport may inject a request and then ignore the response (such as the JMS and Cron transports). In other cases (such as the HTTP transport) the transport will accept the response to the root request and interpret it before directly responding to the initial triggering event. In all cases you can trace root requests with the new Request Visualizer Tool.

NetKernel includes a set of transports for time based events, HTTP events and others. If you need a different transport refer to Transport Development in the NetKernel Extension Guide.