For future (maintenance mode) Kamaelia development
Note: Kamaelia is stable, and useful. However: Kamaelia is not under active development at present.
The website still exists here, and still largely correct: http://kamaelia.org/
There's a note in the description of guild - which is the effective successor to Kamaelia. (Starting with replacing Axon first with something more pythonic)
The short description of guild is:
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Guild is a basic pipelineable Actor system, currently based around threads and a developer friendly syntax. In particular it introduces 2 notions to an actor system - the idea of late binding, and of having common names (or aliases) for the purposes of enabling pipelining.
It's inspired by Kamaelia, but with all the ugly parts removed.
The focus of guild is primarily usability and correctness first, speed later. The latebinding is directly equivalent (and inspired by) the outbox model in Kamaelia and common names/aliases again relates "inbox/control/outbox/signal" and to Kamaelia's idea of backplanes and similar.
Links for Guild:
- https://github.com/sparkslabs/guild - main repo
- http://www.sparkslabs.com/guild/ - placeholder website (generated from the repo)
- http://www.sparkslabs.com/michael/blog/category/guild - blog posts
Guild is NOT directly compatible with Kamaelia. It's a ground up rewrite, using everything learnt in Kamaelia in how to make concurrent systems conceptually easy to work with.
That said, no one likes to throw away work, so there is some work on a compatibility layer occasionally being worked on.
So, what is that compatibility layer?
Kamaelia is a collection of components though as well as concurrency approach, and Guild includes a handful of useful components (including video capture, pygame, STM, backplanes, pipelines, audio capture, QT etc), but as you'd expect these are written as and when needed.
To avoid reinventing useful wheels I started work on a compatibility layer here:
- https://github.com/sparkslabs/guild-kamaelia - This is a repo for reimplementing components for Guild of the same name and behaviour as their Kamaelia counterparts. (The idea to allow drop in replacements to simplify porting)
There is a todo/done/WIP list:
What might actually happen though is for their to become created some form of decorator to allowing wrapping a kamaelia component as a guild actor. The reason for this - in case it's not obvious - is because there are lots of useful kamaelia components that exist and reimplementing them all seems a little silly :-)
That's not been done yet though.
Michael, October 2015