New website

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on a new website for the Syndicate project.

A big part of this has been to widen its focus from just Syndicate per se, in order to avoid the confusion caused by treating “Syndicate” as an umbrella term for a novel Actor model, for Dataspaces, for Conversational Concurrency, for the Domain-Specific Language (DSL) features supporting syndicated-actor programming, and so on.

The new site splits out a few concepts to be treated independently:

  • The Syndicated Actor model is the name for the theory that I started to develop in my dissertation and that I’m still working on.

  • A dataspace is a special kind of syndicated actor whose job is to relay and replicate syndicated state from peer to peer, decoupling information flow from actor identity.

  • The Syndicate DSL is a bundle of language features that make programming with syndicated actors and dataspaces more ergonomic. These features are layered atop base languages like Java, Racket, TypeScript/JavaScript and so on.

  • Conversational concurrency is a term I introduced in my dissertation that captures the style of design of syndicated-actor programs.

The site’s not finished yet, but I think it’s rapidly approaching publishable shape.