created: 20140708083754576
modified: 20140708090217085
tags: doc
title: The Heart of TiddlyWiki (Boot-Kernel)

The boot-kernel is responsible for creating a bare-bones TW environment. It is running under Node.js or in a HTML5 Browser. The Bootkernel just loads enough functionality to load the modules containing the main logic of the application. This boot-kernel contains a few helper methods, the module mechanism as well as the function to create a tiddler and manage them. The boot-kernel also creates the bare-bones wiki store, which holds all the information of the wiki during the runtime. After creating the store, the boot-kernel is in charge of decrypting the encrypted tiddlers and extracting all the tiddlers e.g. the core module tiddlers embedded in the DOM structure of the HTML file. Furthermore the boot kernel offers the functionality to load tiddlers from a file, when you run TW with Node.js. All other functionality which is not a part of the boot kernel is added dynamically by modules and plugins. The boot kernel is able to load the core plugins and perform the startup plugins. The core contains the startup modules shown in the picture below.

{{index.svg}}