Today's installment of my Friday podcast series, which I'm now calling Interviews with Innovators (RSS feed here), began life as a screencast in which Peter Rodgers, founder and CEO of 1060 Research, was demonstrating the 1060 NetKernel. It's an unusual creature -- a REST-oriented, microkernel-based app server that I first noticed back in 2004.
At the end of a long demo and conversation, I concluded that the things Peter showed me in the demo -- for example, podcast feed synthesis involving XML transformation and text-to-speech conversion -- didn't really tell the story. So I edited down the two hours of audio to produce a half-hour podcast which I think works much better.
NetKernel is a dual-licensed open source product. Among the commercial licensees that we discuss, Peter mentions one public-facing project: Pharm2Fork, which aims to take a decentralized, peer-to-peer approach to the implementation of the European Union's food traceability regulations.
Here's a snippet from the end of the interview:
Peter Rodgers: I suppose we're a bit out of the mainstream.
Me: Oh, you're a long way out of the mainstream!
NetKernel is, nevertheless, a fascinating effort to extend the principles of web architecture -- both within, as well as across, system boundaries. Give it a listen, try out the product if the ideas catch your fancy, and should you wind up using it in an interesting way, let me know.
Update: Transcript available.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2006/06/02.html#a1460