StLJUG - Jan 2008: NetKernel

Last night I attended my first JUG meeting, the January meeting of the St. Louis Java Users Group. The meeting lasted about 2 hours (~30 minutes > than planned) and involved about 30 minutes of misc discussion and Q/A and a 90 minute presentation on NetKernel. There were about 30 people there and it was held (ironically enough) in a building complex where Microsoft has there big offices in town.

All in all, I really enjoyed it and will definitely be trying to make it a regular thing. Luckily there is also the Gateway Java Users Group which meats on a different night each month, so getting to at least one shouldn't be too hard.

From what I understood of the presentation (my brain was pretty fried after working all day) NetKernel seems like an interesting solution for gluing together lots of data processing/translating/aggregating pieces of logic together into a larger system that by the nature of its architecture is very scalable and adaptable. Some of this seemed to stem out of the ability of the micro kernel to do some interesting resource allocation and scheduling along with the use of a "RESTful" design aproach. I don't pretend to understand either concept, but it made sense when the presenter said it. :) While I didn't have the "aha!" moment that some may have, I was a very interesting presentation with some very spirited discussion and gives me a few new things to add to my huge list of "Things to Learn Some Day". The ideas of REST do seem appealing (I have been hearing about them a lot lately, but haven't had a chance to really sit down and try to understand how they work) in how they take a very simple set of rule which come together to have unexpected benefits to your system.