Potoo

In application message passing system inspired by the actor model.

!Diagram of Potoo internals

Introduction

Potoo provides a framework for constructing an actor system within frontend or backend applications.

It is implemented as a virtual machine (PVM) that is usually embeded into the main class of an application. PVM is used to spawn child "actors" that each execute some unit of work on behalf of the application. Actors are able to communicate with each other via message passing.

Actors can either be "resident" or "remote". Resident actors share the JS event loop with the VM and use its API to execute message passing instructions. Remote actors that do not share the event loop and can be in another process or even another machine.

The API interface describes the methods available to resident actors. Extend the Immutable or Mutable classes to create an implementation or AbstractResident if you need more customisation.

Currently the only remote actors supported are Process which uses the Node.js child_process API to run a separate PVM instance.

There are plans however to support web sockets, web workers and possibly green thread actors.

Installation

npm install --save @quenk/potoo

Usage

Consult the tests folder for now.

License

Apache-2.0 (C) 2022 Quenk Technologies Limited