Ending The Absurdity

“If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” - Albert Einstein Peter and I were talking the other day about how absurd the ROC (resource oriented computing) model can appear. This came about because I’d become re-acquainted with the inner workings of the NetKernel kernel whilst implementing a number of low-level changes for the upcoming version 5 release. How can something so convoluted that every atom of computation resolves to an endpoint through a set of arbitrary and dynamically interrelated address-spaces by an abstract identifier possibly work?
Published Oct 6, 2011  4 min read   netkernel · it industry
 

Enterprise Visualizer Tools

As promised in the previous post here is a sneak peak of the new NetKernel Enterprise Edition Visualizer tools. These tools do not make any new information available as the core visualizer shows every gory detail. However these new views perform in-depth analysis of the low-level data to determine information that can be quite labour intensive to infer when working with large request trees. These new views are: an expiry determinants tool to allow rapid determination of why any particular response is expired.
Published Sep 27, 2011  3 min read   netkernel · visualizer
 

Visualizer - Time Machine Debugging

Over the summer I’ve been working upgrading NetKernel’s Visualizer ready for a major new release planned for the autumn/fall. All this work combined with comments from various folks set me thinking that not much has been said about this critical tool which must appear so alien on first approach. The Visualizer technology was developed along side the NetKernel 4 kernel in the summer of 2007. After earlier experiments with more traditional breakpoint based approaches to debugging we realized that the ROC abstraction was at just the right level to allow a much more powerful debugger to be implemented.
Published Aug 5, 2011  6 min read   netkernel · visualizer
 

Dropbox with nCoDE Part 3

In this third and final part in this series of three post we’ll fill in the final piece of the puzzle and look at how we achieve the Dropbox authentication using OAuth. The previous two parts are found here and here. First a disclaimer, I don’t claim to be knowledgeable about OAuth! I made the point in the last post that you don’t really need to be because the compositional approach hides the unnecessary details.
Published Jun 15, 2011  5 min read   netkernel · ncode
 

Dropbox with nCoDE Part 2

This posting is walk-though of developing an OAuth client service on NetKernel with the nCoDE visual composition environment. If you haven’t read the background material in the first post I recommend you do that first. OAuth involves a three way orchestration between a user on a web browser, a client web application and a service web application. The basic idea is that a client application with limited trust can access a service application without ever gaining access to the users credentials and in a way that can be be managed in terms of scope and duration by the service application.
Published Jun 10, 2011  5 min read   netkernel · ncode
 

Dropbox With nCoDE Part 1

With any worry about having too many buzzwords and technologies in one place cast aside, this post is the first in a series which will show you how I developed a Dropbox web application using the Dropbox restful OAuth API with a compositional approach using new and little discussed NetKernel compositional development environment nCoDE. First a little background on compositional development and nCoDE. Compositional development is an approach that focuses on the assembly and configuration of pre-existing components to build systems.
Published Jun 3, 2011  5 min read   netkernel · ncode
 

Home Monitor Reloaded

I can’t believe that the last time I mentioned my home monitor project was exactly six years ago! For those who haven’t heard of it before the home monitor project is a home automation system running in my house which attempts to capture as much useful information and control as much as is possible with the absolute minimum of expensive equipment. It is also acting as a bit of a playground for doing fun things with NetKernel.
Published Feb 10, 2011  4 min read   internet of things
 

Modelling Injected Spaces

One of the enhancements to the ROC abstraction that was introduced with NetKernel 4 was the ability to dynamically inject address spaces into the scope of resource requests. In NetKernel 3 the scope was determined purely from the requestors scope and the resolution path through any space imports to the resolved endpoint. In NetKernel 4 this same basic approach is used but any endpoint can now inject new spaces into the scope before issuing a request.
Published Nov 30, 2010  3 min read   resource oriented computing
 

Resource Oriented Modelling Language

We are getting close the first anniversary of the NetKernel 4. With the release of Netkernel 4 finally we had the solid core ROC abstraction that we had always talked about. Along with the core abstraction came a metadata model which we haven’t really talked a lot about. Metadata means a lot of different things to different people so just to be clear, what I’m talking about here is the system state that is generated and captured by the core NetKernel infrastructure of the kernel in combination with standard modules.
Published Oct 12, 2010  4 min read   resource oriented computing
 

Separating Architecture from Code

The MP3 format is a great technology for compressing audio because it can be progressively configured to reduce the complexity in an audio stream in the parts that humans are less able to perceive. It understands the psycho-acoustics of human hearing and the typical waveforms that constitute music. By working in a constrained domain it can represent the data in a more concentrated form. Similarly JPEG is a great technology for compressing photographs because it can reduce the complexity in parts of an image that humans are less able to perceive.
Published Mar 5, 2010  7 min read   architecture · philosophy · resource oriented computing
 

Asynchronicity

It’s funny how many coincidences of parallel thoughts about the same thing seem to be happening recently. Maybe I’m going mad or getting telepathic? Anyway the latest of these coincidences regards the topic of this post. I’ve just noticed that Darren Cruse has been thinking about asynchronous processing in NetKernel and wondering where it was. Yesterday I was thinking the same thing too after reviewing the new NetKernel Quick Reference sheet I’ve been working on.
Published Dec 18, 2009  4 min read   netkernel
 

Where's the API? Where's the code?

These are common questions levelled at NetKernel and the systems developing using NetKernel. They reveal a mismatch of expectations which is caused by a fundamental difference in the structure of software using the Resource Oriented Computing (ROC) abstraction upon which NetKernel is based. In the closing remarks of a previous post I mentioned that ROC liberates systems from being implemented in a single language by virtue of the fact that the ROC middleware acts as an integration platform for different programming languages and technologies.
Published Nov 20, 2009  4 min read   netkernel · resource oriented computing