Resources
Resources are at the heart of a resource oriented system.
In the Getting Started book you were introduced to a variety of resource types
on both the
Addresses
and the
Demo
pages.
The power of resource oriented computing starts to be revealed when
you can see a resource of a given type operated on by services.
When a service is asked to act upon a resource the focus is on the
action to be performed - for example converting all characters
in a text-based resource to upper case:
active:toUpper+operand@ffcpl:/resource/data/greeting.txt
and not on physical level details such as API method names, parameter signatures,
data types, etc.
Additionally, the information you are processing can be changed to a different resource
type easily, such as converting a textual resource into an image resource:
active:toImage
+format@ffcpl:/resource/data/image-format.xml
+message@ffcpl:/resource/data/greeting.txt
Or, in the DPML language:
<instr>
<type>toImage</type>
<format>ffcpl:/resource/data/image-format.xml</format>
<message>ffcpl:/resource/data/greeting.txt</message>
</instr>
(And once converted to an image, resource services such as rotate, crop, scale and dither can be used to further process it.)
Resource types and associated services provide the power to create applications
that are expressed clearly and succinctly as information processing systems
instead of what appears to be a tangle of data, objects and code.
A resource type along with services constitutes a Resource Model.
NetKernel includes several resource models described in the
Resource Model
Guide.
If your system requires a new or different resource model, these can easily be
created and added to your toolbox.
NetKernel extensions are described in the
NetKernel Extension Guide