NetKernel News Volume 1 Issue 11

January 15th 2010

What's new this week?

• standard-module update
• back and frontend fulcrum updates to configure HTTP port
• ProXML Encoding Validation Web Service.

Updates

standard-module has a 1 bit update to the Private Overlay to mark it as thread safe. It was possible that it could be have been busy with an existing request and would therefore prevent concurrent access to requests. This situation would have only occured during the module commission cycle and with deeply nested dynamic imports.

FYI the private overlay is used to wrap a <rootspace> and uses the resolution scope-level to determine whether a resolved endpoint is marked as public and the resolution is permitted, or private and the resolution is prevented (depending on where the requestor originated - ie its resolution scope). Any <private/> tag on an endpoint automatically causes the private overlay to be wrapped around the space - the private overlay can be seen in the space explorer when it is in use.

HTTP front/back end fulcrums: Jeff Rogers found a very elegant solution to the open feature request of being able to set the port of the HTTP transports. It turns out that Jetty's declarative configuration can use system properties with a fallback to default values. We've updated both HTTP fulcrums to use this pattern - you can now set the port by declaring the following system properties using the Java -D switch like...

-Dnetkernel.http.backend.port=1060
-Dnetkernel.http.frontend.port=8080

Which you can add to install/bin/jvmsettings.cnf

The defaults remain 1060 and 8080 as before.

FYI when we ship a new distribution jar, then this solution also has the nice consequence that the distro installer port can be set like this...

java -jar -Dnetkernel.http.backend.port=1060 1060-NKSE-xxxx.jar

But, please note, this will only work when we ship a 4.0.3 distribution with the updated backend fulcrum.

Community News

ProXML Encoding Validator: Paul Hermans has kindly open-sourced an XML encoding validation web service. This tool resulted from a development commission we undertook on behalf of one of his clients. The problem was that a 3rd party supplying XML to a web service was providing inconsistent encoding. This Encoding Validator service allows any XML binary representation to be POSTed to it and a best effort to determine its encoding is performed. (Its actually an indeterminate problem to sniff a binary and give an absolute determination of its encoding - this tool uses two methods to give a high probability estimate)

The NKP package for install with apposite (upload package) is available here...

http://resources.1060research.com/packages/2010/1/proxml-check-encoding-1.1.0.nkp.jar

After install the services interface is as follows...

POST http://servername:8080/check/encoding/

Documentation is provided after install (reindex and search for "proxml"). Here's a brief summary...

The service is located on the front-end fulcrum at the path /check/encoding/ - on a default NetKernel system this will be at the following URL http://localhost:8080/check/encoding/

Usage

The client to the service must issue an HTTP POST request with a body containing the XML resource to be tested. A report on the determined encoding will be returned as a UTF-8 encoded XML response like...

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ROC News

There's not a lot of public visibility this week - we've been focused on the development of an upcoming NetKernel customer services portal. I hope to get time soon to share several useful design patterns that it uses.

On a different subject and in the spirit of "putting it about", we've been posting submissions to conferences such as this

http://www.codegeneration.net/cg2010/

Please let us know If you know of a conference that you think we ought to have some presence at.

Have a great weekend.