The kernel boots just enough of the TiddlyWiki environment to allow it to load tiddlers and execute JavaScript modules. Plugin modules are written like `node.js` modules.
There are many [[different types of module|ModuleType]]: parsers, serializers, deserializers, macros etc. It goes much further than you might expect. For example, individual tiddler fields are modules, too: there's a module that knows how to handle the `tags` field, and another that knows how to handle the special behaviour of the `modified` and `created` fields.
In TiddlyWiki5, [[Plugins]] are bundles of tiddlers that are distributed and managed as one; [[Modules]] are JavaScript tiddlers with a module type identifying when and how they should be executed.
The tiddler [[$:/core/boot.js]] is a barebones TiddlyWiki kernel that is just sufficient to load the core plugin modules and trigger a startup module to load up the rest of the application.
* Code for the browser to load tiddlers from the HTML DOM
* Code for the server to load tiddlers from the file system
Each module is an ordinary `node.js`-style module, using the `require()` function to access other modules and the `exports` global to return JavaScript values. The boot kernel smooths over the differences between `node.js` and the browser, allowing the same plugin modules to execute in both environments.
In the browser, `core/boot.js` is packed into a template HTML file that contains the following elements in order:
* Ordinary and shadow tiddlers, packed as HTML `<DIV>` elements
* `core/bootprefix.js`, containing a few lines to set up the plugin environment
On the server, `core/boot.js` is executed directly. It uses the `node.js` local file API to load plugins directly from the file system in the `core/modules` directory. The code loading is performed synchronously for brevity (and because the system is in any case inherently blocked until plugins are loaded).
The boot kernel sets up the `$tw` global variable that is used to store all the state data of the system.
