Introduction

This chapter is a small introduction to the technical documentation of JNode.
It covers the basic parts of JNode and refers to their specific documentation.

JNode is a Virtual Machine and an Operating System in a single package. This implies that the technical documentation covers both the Virtual Machine side and the Operating System side.


Besides these two, there is one aspect to JNode that is shared by the Virtual Machine and the Operating System. This aspect is the PluginManager. Since every module in JNode is a Plugin, the PluginManager is a central component responsible for plugin lifecycle support, plugin permissions and plugin loading, unloading & reloading.

The picture below gives an overview of JNode and its various components.

It also states which parts of JNode are written in Java (green) and which part are written in native assembler (red).

As can be seen in the picture above, many parts of the class library are implemented using services provided by the JNode Operating System. These services include filesystems, networking, gui and many more.