[First sent to the NetKernel news email list 26 March 2010]

What's new this week?  End-to-end support for the new HTTP PATCH verb,
enhancements to Jabber and Intray transports, Groovy 1.7.1 first look,
Resource Oriented ESB demo.  Some boring stuff about mailing list.

Repository News
---------------

http-client:  Implements last week's standard approval of IETF 5789
PATCH method (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789) (see below).

jabber-xmpp:  Now supports TLS encrypted connections and the option to
supply a port number. (Thanks to Chris Cormack for contribution.)

intray-transport:  The intray transport now provides the optional
ability to specify a file extension match on the input side and the file
extension to be used for the processed output file.  (Thanks to Darren
Cruse for contribution.)

nkse-license: Support panel modified to point to the new newsletter
service (see below).

[To get updates from the repositories use Apposite->admin->"synchronize"
then view "Packages" and "select all updates"].

Housekeeping: Mailing List Transition
-------------------------------------

Our mailing lists are in the process of transitioning to a new more
flexible implementation on the NetKernel Portal.  This is of no interest
to you I know, but it does mean the new system has the option to
unsubscribe and supports multiple lists for special interest
topics.  More importantly, it enables us to issue ad-hoc announcements
such as security alerts so we can offer you a better service.

We'll run the two in parallel this week and next, but then close down
the older system.  So, if you want to keep receiving these newsletters
and you haven't already done so, register on the portal which will renew
your subscription...

https://cs.1060research.com/csp/

If you are already registered on the portal and don't want to get this
weekly newsletter, just uncheck "NetKernel Newsletter" in your portal
settings https://cs.1060research.com/csp/settings/

HTTP PATCH VERB
---------------

Following last week's ratification of the PATCH method as a standard
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5789 we have implemented a new accessor
active:httpPatch in the http-client library.    The argument syntax is
the same as for active:httpPut but the semantics are defined as
conveying a change set as the body representation.

Brian Sletten discusses how PATCH could play out with RDF resource models...

http://www.semanticuniverse.com/blogs-http-patch-and-tracking-rdf-changes.html

And of course PATCH is equally applicable for text, XML,.... and
application specific resource models.

The http-server is unchanged since the HTTPBridge is already a general
solution that provides the resource httpRequest:/method  - which when
requested will return "PATCH" if the server is handling a PATCH request
from the active:httpPatch client.   It is your service/application's
responsibility to choose the success response code (with the
recommendation being to use 204) and to issue error handling response
codes as per the specification.

Development News
----------------

We've started evaluation and testing Groovy 1.7.1 prior to release for
both NKSE 4.1.0 and NKEE final.  The 1.7 family adds anonymous inner
classes for more Java equivalence, plus plenty of other enhancements...

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GROOVY/Groovy+1.7+release+notes

Its directly replaceable with 1.6.x library we currently ship - so if
you're keen, you can swap over the groovy-all.jar in the lib/ directory
of the lang-groovy module.

Out of the box its passing all our regression tests but we'll take a
little time to monitor it over the longer term.  We're cautious with
adopting language runtime updates just in case.

One difference we've already found is that you need to take care with
static variable declarations used in the main script body and not part
of an inner class - if you're currently using 1.6.x you might want to
take care with these to avoid future incompatibility.

On a related note, it looks like JRuby is now nearing a level of
maturity that would make it viable as a language option on NK.  We
actually have an unreleased JRuby runtime based on JRuby 1.1.x. But we
felt JRuby was too transitional to be released. However it now seems to
have a stable embedding API, and hopefully it will have addressed
intialisation performance issues that made it unviable before.

The NK JRuby integration has a companion module that provides the Ruby
1.8 class library (loaded through the ROC address space - with an ROC
Ruby path similar to the pattern we use with lang-python).

If there's a pressing demand we can put some effort into integrating
1.4.x and releasing as a package.

ROC Community News
------------------

Last week Jeremy Deane presented his NetKernel-based "Resource Oriented
ESB" architecture at The Server Side symposium in Las Vegas...

Presentation is here:    http://files.me.com/jtdeane/hhc4po

It combines RESTful web services, JMS and 3rd party SOAP-ws using clean
URI abstracted services to provide normalized transport-independent
middleware.  The system is mission critical and serves 20,000+ users a day.

He's gone the extra mile and produced a very comprehensive demo that can
be adapted as needed...

Demo is here:   http://files.me.com/jtdeane/agqwsg

Judging from the audience's twitter traffic the presentation was very
well received.

---
Hope the mailing list transition doesn't cause you too much pain.
Incidentally you probably notice there were no low-level kernel, layer0
etc updates this week, that's because Mr B. hasn't mastered how to
ski and type at the same time (yet).

Have a great weekend,

The 1060 Team