A ReST Micro Kernel Revisited

A year ago I stumbled upon NetKernel from 1060Research. I had intended on investigating in more intricate detail. Unfortunately, the curse of our profession is that there's too many interesting technologies that compete for your attention. I am sure that the technology had progressed significantly since I last looked at it when it was version 1.0.

Recently I've been brainstorming the idea of a ReST application framework, I was planning on revisiting the 1060's product. Fortunately for me, Peter Rodgers the CEO of 1060Research gave me a call and gave me a refresher on the latest innovations of his ReST based microkernel.

Many times it takes a while for new ideas to sink it. 1060Research's NetKernel is a treasure trove of innovative ideas. The first intersting idea is the notion of an Active URI. The Active URI is used to invoke services, however rather than hardwire a URI to a single service, the Active URI is an expression language that allows for multiple service invocations to be composed and invoked in a single URI. In otherwords, a mini language that helps express navigation through a service graph.

The second interesting notion is the idea of a public URI and an internal URI. This idea should be familiar for those who have worked with Apache as a reverse proxy. The idea is also found in BPM practice where one defines a public process separate from an internal process. NetKernel provides mapping functionality to translate a public URI into an internal URI.

A third interesting notion is that the NetKernel provides support for Adapter Oriented Programming. The folks at 1060 choose to call it "Transreptors". When one builds an XML transformation pipeline in NetKernel, it appears that the kernel is able to dynamically select the appropriate transformation module to bridge incompatible formats. It's the object remodularization pattern applied to XML transformation pipelines.

Finally, the kernel appears to implement a Staged Event Driven Architecture (i.e. SEDA) that allows it to throttle an incoming request queue. The product can also be embedded within a standard J2EE container to service MDB invocations. There are of course many other ideas inside this product that's worth discovering, fortunately for us, the product is dual licensed open source. Something worthy of consideration in your next ReSTful application.