Documentation lacking about orbit HOT 10 CLOSED

My apologies on the continuing lack of docs.
It is high on my priority list but other things continue to get in the way.

Orbit 2 is actually quite different to Orbit 1.

• It's a standalone application - Like a database or similar, you deploy instances of Orbit 2 (or use a managed service in theory)
• More generic - Orbit 2 is not specifically an actor framework but is a more generic routing, placement and messaging platform
• Model what you want - With the above, you can model different kinds of behaviors, from basic RPC to actors and streams. We provide default impls (such as virtual actors) in our client sdks to help you get started
• Standards are good - We've made the tech less custom by leveraging technology such as gRPC under the hood
• Polyglot - Because Orbit 2 is using industry accepted protocols etc, in theory it can work across languages by way of client SDKs. Currently we only have the Kotlin/JVM SDK but there is no reason we couldn't provide Go, NodeJS etc in future
• Modern - For the server side of things we've adopted Kotlin and in general the approach is more modern. We learned a lot of lessons from Orbit 1 and now we have a chance to address them in the core design

There is so much more it is hard to cover, how it does all of the above is quite interesting and I hope to be able to dive deep in the docs to describe it all.

In general, the takeaways are:

• Orbit is effectively a server/service that you access via a client sdk
• It's meant to help you with the problems inherent in how you place instances of objects, load balance between them and route messages to them in a distributed system
• We've pre-modelled some common use cases (such as virtual actors) to make it as friendly as possible.

One other small note I wanted to add, it is in a working state at this point, and internally we have early adopter customers starting to shake it down. I realize without docs it is quite painful, but it is possible to use.

Most of our future effort will be into:

• Handling shutdown etc more gracefully (with the goal of supporting zero downtime updates and similar)
• Some features that were present in Orbit 1 are not yet modelled in Orbit 2 (streams being the major one)
• Documentation
• Logging & metrics
• etc

from orbit.

Thanks for your interest. Unfortunately Orbit 2 is not yet in a working state, we're working hard to get it there and expect to have an early release in the next few weeks.
Documentation will accompany the release.

from orbit.

Hi folks. We've done an initial round of documentation to help with the concepts and onboarding.
Orbit Docs
There is also a sample app which can help fill in some blanks and get you going.
Orbit Sample

Hope that's helpful and we can get some time to beef up the docs in the future. We welcome any feedback and we also take contributions, including documentation, if you have them.

from orbit.

Hoping to learn more about the internal design and decisions made in the near future.

from orbit.

Thanks. I'm looking forward to it!
Keep the good work up 🙂

from orbit.

Orbit is really interesting, Any design concept ?

from orbit.

Since this is relative to the lack of documentation, what can we expect from Orbit 2.0?

Will it introduce some fundamental changes or is it just a rewrite in Kotlin to take advantage of features like suspending functions?

Sorry for the hijack.

from orbit.

If understood explanation correctly Orbit 2 is somewhat similar to Microsoft's new project called Dapr? Dapr uses sidecar app made with Go language that is running side by side with your client app you can write in any programming language and sidecar handles cluster management, virtual actor routing and storage etc. https://github.com/dapr/dapr

from orbit.

Looks great!

from orbit.

If understood explanation correctly Orbit 2 is somewhat similar to Microsoft's new project called Dapr? Dapr uses sidecar app made with Go language that is running side by side with your client app you can write in any programming language and sidecar handles cluster management, virtual actor routing and storage etc. https://github.com/dapr/dapr

There are definitely similarities, which is interesting!

from orbit.