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DPML is a declarative language for internet resource processing. We tend to think of DPML as like a declarative assembly language for processing resources.

Assembly Language - Forget it!

Don't panic. It's nothing like assembly language in complexity. 'Declarative' should give you a warm fuzzy feeling since that means flexibility, robustness and maintainability, in fact DPML is designed to be as robust and flexible as the declarative and ubiquitous HTML web page. Only with DPML the resources and applications are generalized and so we're not limited to producing web-sites. In fact DPML can be used to build arbitrary XML applications including web-sites, web-services, standalone applications...

This tutorial starts with an introduction to the core features of a DPML instruction document.

Author Comment Jan 2005

This tutorial was written nearly 2 years ago. It provides a purely DPML-centric view of using NetKernel. Since it was written, NetKernel has evolved and now supports a wide choice of languages. Keep in mind that you have more than one option available. It is frequently convenient to use DPML as a high-level scheduling language to invoke other services/pipelines written in a dynamic/scripting language.

This tutorial progressively reveals some of the workings of NetKernel from the perspective of DPML. This deliberately concentrates on stuff you need to understand to use DPML and so is not a comprehensive view of the underlying concepts - please take a look at the NetKernel overview for a more complete view of the NetKernel concepts. DPML is just a very simple language which constructs active URI requests and issues and sequences these requests to the kernel - understand the NetKernel absraction and you'll understand how DPML really works!

Finally, aren't you pleased I didn't carry on with the bad jokes throughout the rest of the documentation?