Separates Architecture from Code

Unix and REST are actually closely related. NetKernel is related to both. It adds some new generalisations, some of which are new conceptual leaps.

We regularly publish articles in the weekly newsletters exploring the concepts within ROC. This article provides a side-by-side comparison table of Unix, REST and ROC.

Fundamentally NetKernel and ROC offer a new way to do software. New software with new higher-order qualities...

Malleability

• Incredible flexibility
• Long term stability - generational stability of information and structure
• Dynamic type adaptation and pipelined conversion discovery
• Elimination of brittleness

Throughput Performance

• Higher performance - typically 2-3x on the same hardware.
• Scale your solution - add more cores and see your system scale linearly
• Do more with less - deploy more applications per system.
• Memory Efficient - unexpectedly perhaps, NetKernel's abstraction actually leads to reduced memory footprints and is more JVM GC friendly
  • For example, this dynamic web site and the NetKernel Portal are running on a single NetKernel instance with 128MB heap.
  • Also running are the Bugxter bug tracking system, download and mirroring services, REST SOA callback services and mailing list services.
  • Typically it balances with a total memory footprint of about 40MB. So we have 3x margin of comfort.

Development Performance

• Faster development - less code, less coupling, more reuse.
• Human-scale modularity - partition your problem in to engineer sized units, bring them together without needing glue code.
• Shorter code, test, deploy lifecycles

Lifetime

• Hot deployment and transactional rollback
• Progressive update and version migration
• Legacy coexistence - new features never need to disturb existing functionality allowing for progressive evolutionary solutions.

A growing number of people are using and applying NetKernel and ROC in a wide range of industries. A selection are presented here

A detailed analysis of NetKernel's performance and multi-core scaling is provided here. To see this for yourself on your own systems, download NetKernel and try out some of the demos. Especially look at the detailed nk-perf Benchmarking tool - it will show detailed evidence of the linear scaling and constant load-line throughput capabilities on your own hardware.

Strangely perhaps, but less so when you've played with NetKernel and explored some of the concepts behind ROC, our most compelling evidence is the World Wide Web; the most successful software system ever created. The Web succeeds because of its fundamental economic property: All information systems are compelled to change. For the Web, the value added by a change is greater than its cost.. More concisely, the Web is a software model in which change is cheap.

You might not have realized it but the Web is an ROC system. We demonstrate this in the first NetKernel tutorial, where it shows that the Web is an instance of just one basic ROC pattern using a single ROC address space.

Its cheap to create, modify, augment and evolve solutions in the Web. The Web is an instance of an ROC system, it follows that it is cheap to create, modify, augment and evolve solutions in ROC. The existence and success of the Web demonstrates this over the long term. NetKernel is a generalization of the ideas behind the Web, for the first time it allows the Web's economic values to be applied to any class of software problem both Web and non-Web.

Architects will instantly appreciate the potential and new clean patterns they can design in the ROC domain. But moving to and using ROC doesn't require a sudden and complete conversion. Existing code can be brought to an ROC architecture unchanged and then progressively adapted to take advantage of the new flexibility.

When you know ROC, it takes about 2 days for you to get an existing Java developer up to speed with the new dimensions offered by ROC.

One of the beauties of ROC is that it allows architects to focus on what they do best - designing the structure of information systems. Because code is separate from architecture, the high-level design can be refined without concern for code details and if code is required, that development can be left to the coding experts - using which ever language they prefer.

Take the red pill and you will certainly see the world with new eyes. How much you gain from this depends on what motivates you. Is your motivation to solve problems or to write code? If it's the latter then you are taking a risk since with ROC you will solve problems with much less code.

There is a learning curve to ROC, just like there was when you learned object oriented programming. It is no longer and no steeper, just different.

You can teach yourself ROC by playing with NetKernel and its hot-installable tutorials. Your risk is the investment of time. Learning ROC is as much about letting go of your preconceptions of what software is and does. You will reduce your risk by retaining an open mind and a willingness to play and explore the new landscape.

Watching and learning from an expert will shorten your time to productivity and certainly lower your risk. We can help with a range of training to accelerate your success.

NetKernel implements the Resource Oriented Computing abstraction and as such it is a general purpose platform.

NetKernel powers very large scale telecoms systems, very large online-retail web-properties, critical internet infrastructure such as purl.org, commercial publishing platforms etc. It's scale invariant nature means it can solve small workgroup problems, and yet seamlessly grow and scale to high-end architectural engineering systems.

Here are some typical uses:

• Information integration - a set of rapidly composable endpoints which adapt to many industry standard technologies means NetKernel is ideally suited to information integration. Examples include HTTP (REST/WS) , JMS, email, SMS and relational,xmldb and semantic databases.
• REST service platform
• Web application platform - especially with the XRL/TRL composition languages. Check out our NetKernel Portal to see a live example of a NetKernel web application.
• Language-X Enterprise Platform - Use NK as the X2EE platform where X is Groovy, Ruby, Scala, Python etc etc. Enterprise infrastructure and modularity for any language.
• ESB - with the unique property of coherent distributed caching.
• Cache-transform process engine
• Complex analysis and recursive algorithm optimisation (statistical reduction in O-complexity of traditional algorithms).
• XML/RDF/xxx pipeline processes
• Multi-transport adaption and bridging.
• Visual composition - with nCoDE, create palleted end-user-composable software solutions that you could even give to the CEO to "program" safely.

Perhaps one of the best examples of the use of NetKernel, is... NetKernel. All of the tools, services and systems of the NetKernel platform are themselves ROC applications dynamically composed into the framework you're using now.

NetKernel and ROC is the result of over 10 years of hard-core computer science research, painstaking care over implementation and real-world production experience (NetKernel has been in production for mission critical customers, such as telecoms, for six years).

The foundational ideas were conceived back in 1999 when the founders of 1060 Research were in HP Labs. We were experimenting with very large-scale internet payment systems and we learned that low-level code was the wrong level for modern information problems.

You know things are wrong when the cost of developing a system exceeds the transaction value or when the cost of change is higher than the value added.

We set out to develop a way to design and build software that transformed these economics - to reach higher orders of solution, and drive down the cost of change when a businesses information model must flex in response to changes in the real world. In short we wanted software to be cheaper, malleable, and reach to wider scale. NetKernel and ROC does this.

There is no single category of users. NetKernel is a scalable, flexible and comprehensive platform. You can find it powering Enterprise Service Bus architectures, the Permanent URL System, information gathering systems embedded deeply in telecom networks or powering web sites and web services.