NetKernel Development: Construct

The Construct phase of NetKernel development concentrates on building the essential resources and services required by an application.

Details on new resource and service construction is covered in detail in the NetKernel Extension Guide. The development of core resources and services may require special knowledge of a domain or technology and once written may be used in multiple applications. Many core services and resources are included in the NetKernel distribution. Refer to the NetKernel API and Services Reference and the Resource Model Guide to see if you can use or leverage existing capabilities.

It is possible to decouple the construct phase from the compose phase of development through the use of NetKernel modules and address space partitioning. As you will see, the compose phase is focused on the use and coordination of services and resources. Since all services and resources are identified by a location in a particular address space specified by a URI, it is possible to construct a set of surrogate services for use by developers focused on the compose phase.

To use surrogate services and decouple the construct and compose phases, create a module and configure it to support the anticipated address space and services. For example, map all service requests to a single script that will return the same value each time it is called. This will allow the calling client code to be composed and tested independently.

While focusing on the development of the authentic services and resources, it is important to establish scaffolding to support and test the new code. This can be done by creating a module that will host test drivers and which imports the module under development. You can also use the XUnit testing framework to drive new code.