For those with a long memory of the industry, the version number 3.1 has a certain significance. Remember Windows 3.1? The first version of Windows that was slightly useable.

NetKernel reaches version 3.1 today. Now hang on, I'm not making any association between the history of Windows and NetKernel!!! Rather, for a software product, 3.1 is a rite-of-passage. A milestone. Like your 18th/21st birthday. It says: 'This software is mature'.

In that spirit, NetKernel 3.1 is predominantly a production update. It brings together the module upates that were released and have beeen available on the update service over the last 6 months. Examples include enhancement tweaks to the web-service library to support relative endpoints. Updates to mod-xml and javascript to solve library issues in Apache xmlbeans that propogated up into E4X. Updates to the XSLT accessor to make NetKernel the entity resolver for DTD declarations.

Most of these updates have been prompted or submitted by our users and their real world production applications. A big thanks to you all - you have validated our ambition that an interactive dual license model could stimulate a QA feedback loop that continually refines the product.

So 3.1 is just a repackage? Nope. We found time to add some new tools, including a streaming editor (sed) - something we've needed to provide a streamed variable substitution layer over cached XRL application tiers. We also include a preview of the Ruby language runtime - as we mentioned at the Architects weekend we will track JRuby and will make Ruby a fully supported language when it reaches 1.0 early next year. The inclusion of this preview allows you to try out developing NK services in Ruby and to explore the use of Ruby libraries within scripted NK systems.

Finally as part of our philosophy of continual improvement, we have written a brand-new "Getting-Started" book in the system documentation. A big thank you to all those of you that scaled the curve to grasp the NetKernel 'way of thinking' - we've listened and tried to gently introduce NetKernel's resource-oriented approach in a way that shows how NK is an abstraction above the object-oriented world. Critically we hope we now show that NK doesn't demand that you forget the whole OO world, it is still critical, but in NK it lives within loosely coupled service-based containers - aka Accessors.

So there's something for everyone in 3.1. For production customers a new, ready-to-deploy, distribution of production proven libraries. For the adventurous a new language to explore. And for the new NetKernel user (or the user that bounced off NK in a previous encounter) a learning curve that has hand-holds and a route map.

Finally, a personal perspective on why and how I keep focused on delivering NetKernel. At the recent NetKernel conference it was just amazing to hear from people that are excited and who, unprompted, wanted to share their production experience of how NK solves problems and delivers solutions that work. When you've got people like that around and you hear that doing things differently with NK pays off, its not hard to feel that the world of NetKernel is a hell of a lot of fun. Thanks.

Get it whiles its hot: NetKernel v3.1