Yesterday I presented at XML 2004 a talk titled "Building Robust Heterogeneous Asynchronous XML Pipelines - from XML pipelines to XML processes". Thanks for all the positive feedback I received afterwards.

Here are the slides. The demo I showed can be explored in the interactive NetKernel documentation - just install NetKernel and then search for 'XML pipeline'.

No sooner do you make a release than you find you've got some minor revisions to roll into the build! So we've just posted an update to the RC1 build

http://www.1060.org/upload/1060-NetKernel-SE-DK2.0.0-RC1.jar

Nothing but under-the-covers tweaks but its better to get them into the RC now so you have the very latest build.

As ever please send feedback to mailto:feedback@1060.org or http://feedback.1060.org/

FYI, the only major addition worth mention is we've added John Cowan's tagSoup as an accessor in the ext-xhtml module. TagSoup is a parser which processes ugly HTML to cleaned up XML - and we all know there's plenty of ugly HTML out there to process!

You're looking at Blogxter v1.0.0 which is up and running on NetKernel 2.0.0 RC1 here on 1060.org. This multi-user publishing application will be available as an installable module when NetKernel ships in a few weeks time.

The interesting thing about Blogxter is that its composed entirely of services. Everything you see is generated through a REST-like NetKernel service - even the image buttons come from a service which takes the label text as an argument.

I call this a service-composition pattern for creating Web applications. It is powerful because it leads to clean modular web apps where the cost of change/update is very low. There's an article which goes into specifics here.

We're very eager to get market feedback on the use and preception of NetKernel prior to the launch campaign for NetKernel v2.0.0.

We'd really appreciate it if you could take a couple of minutes to take our survey

http://carly.1060research.com/questionnaire/

Today we shipped release candidate 1 of NetKernel 2.0.0. it's available for download at

http://www.1060.org/upload/1060-NetKernel-SE-DK2.0.0-RC1.jar

There are many enhancements in this version including:

• NetKernel Foundation API - a consistent API for constructing and scheduling requests with base classes for accessors, transports, tranreptors and fragmentors.
• NetKernel Scripting Framework - supports dynamic languages including Groovy, Beanshell, Python and Javascript. Scripts are dynamically compiled and using the NKF API it's easy to write pipelined services in a procedural style.
• Improved asynchronous control - API and service-level forking and joining of processes and services.
• Support for integration and scheduling/pipelining of native OS processes.
• Mailbox processing transport - to enable NetKernel as an email processing server.
• Updated documentation including worked examples of XML pipelines.

Plus much more...

Please download it and give it a good thrashing and let us know how you get on.