NetKernel News Volume 2 Issue 40

This is a snapshot of the first boot of NetKernel running natively on my Android phone.

You'll recall that last week I was speculating about how suitable Android's native Dalvick JVM would be? Well, after a little bit of research and some tinkering around, it turns out its eminently suitable for NetKernel.

This is NetKernel running as cross-compiled DEX bytecode. The NK kernel itself required zero modifications to compile for Android. The cache, layer0 and standard module needed a couple of very minor changes...

1. to remove a method that used the MemoryMBean in javax.management which is not available on Android (but there's an android.system equivalent)
2. a very minor fix to the XPath validation code in the standard module commission due to Android using a different implementation of DOM.

This particular image is showing that we've loaded two modules. The first was installed locally from the netkernel-boot.akp package (Android's version of an application package), the second module "urn:test" was located and commissioned from the phone's SD-Card and is loaded dynamically, just like any other module.

The message "The Eagle has landed" was printed after we had constructed an NKFTransport, issued a request for res:/resources/hello.txt into the Test rootspace of the Test module, and received back a response with a ClassLoaderResourceRepresentation (an IReadableBinaryStream impl). Like this...

ISpaceWithIdentity rootSpace=k.getSpace(new SimpleIdentifierImpl("urn:test"), null, null);
INKFRequestContext aContext = new NKFTransportContextImpl(k, rootSpace, this);
INKFRequest req=aContext.createRequest("res:/resources/hello.txt");
Object rep=aContext.issueRequest(req);

In short this is showing that we have full, living, breathing, ROC address spaces.

The total installation footprint of the netkernel android package was 776KB, which compares with the barcode scanner app I mentioned last week at 1.1MB and Skype at 4.88MB.

So the headline news is: There are no show stoppers to deploying NK/ROC on Android. Its NetKernel, its modular, its small, it scales and its fast as hell.

The question for you is, what do you want to do now that ROC spans both client (phone) and server-side (cloud) with seamless bidirectional requests over NKP? When you've thought about it, come and talk to us - there's a heck of lot of possibilities/opportunities.