NetKernel News Volume 1 Issue 42

August 19th 2010

What's new this week?

• NetKernel Enterprise Edition Released to Manufacture.
• WiNK updates, including Latex mathematics.

Catch up on last week's news here

NetKernel Enterprise Edition v4.1.1

We're very pleased to announce the release of NetKernel Enterprise Edition v4.1.1. Available now from all good stockists...

https://cs.1060research.com/csp/download/ (registration required)

A summary of key features found in Enterprise Edition include...

• NetKernel Architectural Library - a suite of architectural components such as virtual hosting, load shaping throttles, non-invasive instrumentation etc.
• NetKernel Cloud Infrastructure - NetKernel Protocol (NKP) client and server allow the NetKernel ROC abstraction to seamlessly span a cluster of cloud servers.
• NetKernel ssh daemon
• Repository Manager - Build and manage your own Apposite repositories.
• Realtime Profiling and Reporting - detailed response times, scheduling priorities and system-wide performance profile.
• Multimode Deadlock Detector - Detect and manage deadlock scenarios such as thread starvation, infinite loops.
• Role-based system access control
• +++ many more

As well as extra features, Enterprise Edition comes with long-term stability assurance...

Stability Assurance

The formal release of Enterprise Edition signifies the start of our commitment to its long-term 5-year stability assurance. This means any future maintenance updates to the NKEE 4.1.1 service libraries, both shipped with the distribution or installed from the extended NKEE apposite repository, will retain application-level backwards compatibility. Giving you long-term stability assurance for the foundation of your production systems.

Future Innovation

Stability doesn't mean fossilization. One of the beauties of ROC is that new services seamlessly co-exist with legacy (just as in the Web). Therefore we are committed to continue to innovate and provide enhancements that broaden the feature set of the Enterprise platform whilst maintaining the legacy working set.

Our commitment to Enterprise stability means that such enhancements will not be released to the Enterprise repository until having undergone our extensive QA process.

NKSE Repository Updates

The following updates are available in the NKSE repository. These updates are already incorporated in the core release of NKEE. Going forward we will continue to clearly distinguish NKSE and NKEE repository updates. So that you can be sure to identify NKEE production updates.

• layer0 1.38.1
• layer1 1.17.1
• standard-module 1.25.1
  • Enhancements to stability of modules during (re)commission.

Applications

• demo-ping-pong 1.2.1
  • Now correctly sets framerate on Mac/Linux systems
• wink 1.12.1
  • Supports gzip compression, better search (see below).
• wink-mathjax 1.2.1
  • New macro library for WiNK (see below)
• wink-slinki 1.6.1
  • New configurable setup options, including optional splash screen. Plus now served through WiNK compression layer.
• wink-slinki-demo 1.4.1
  • Updated to use new features

WiNK Updates

We did a small refactor to the WiNK wiki application. It now uses a pluggable-overlay postProcess to apply gzip compression to all resources served through it. This includes any resources that come from dynamically imported libraries, including any static resources in the path res:/wink/res/.

The compressed representations are cacheable, save network bandwidth and also, since all javascript is now automatically squeezed, it speeds the "boot" time of some of the ajax-based WiNK "application frameworks" like SliNKi or MathJax (see below).

Another small change was to modify the way that a full reindex discovers content. As before, it looks at the default filesystem storage, but it now also individually indexes each wiki resource space coming from "WinkDynamic" dynamic imports.

MathJax WiNK Macros

There's a new MathJax based library that allows you to use Latex maths syntax in WiNK. For example here's Euler's equation...

$$e^{i \pi}=-1$$

(This is also a clickable link)

Just for the hell of it here's the Schrödinger wave equation...

$$i\hbar\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t} = \frac{\hbar^2}{2m}\nabla^2\psi + V(\mathbf{r})\psi$$

which has the markup...

To use the MathJax macro, just declare the macro like this...

{mathjax} {/mathjax}

... and then simply type Latex maths in the page. Note you need to delimit it with the following markup...

• Use $$ ... $$ to delimit a block equation
• Use \( ... \) for inline equations.

For further examples here's a demo wiki page and a SliNKi presentation showing how WiNK macro libraries can be combined as needed...

• MathJax in Wiki
• MathJax in SliNKi presentation

Install

Use Apposite to install wink-mathjax. Note, we don't include a copy of the MathJax library with the module since it includes a ton of bitmap fonts and is pretty big. Therefore you'll need to download it, expand it and copy the MathJax/ directory into the mathjax macro module. Detailed instructions are provided in the documentation after the apposite install.

Have a great weekend.