Sphactor is currently a research project for a framework for concurrent programming suitable for novice users while maintaining features needed by expert programmers. The library features an actor model at its core and features a GUI application to manage actor dependencies visually and also program individual actors using a classical text based approach.

One of the initial questions for Sphactor was the fact that when students want to access new technologies they often need to be experienced programmers. However this is hardly ever the case. As an example; students need to access motion capture sensors however only an SDK is provided. We can overcome this hurdle by adding some software to make this more accessible. We found that most tools used by students in our academy can utilize the OSC (Open Sound Control) out of the box. Therefore we started transmitting sensor data through OSC. This has proven to be very comfortable for students. We then ran into the situation that for every technology we needed to develop a piece of software to translate its features to OSC. To prevent creating a jungle of tools we started researching how we could create a general intermediate layer between technologies and use OSC as a transport. This is a common question in the IOT world.

Continued research showed us that students, using existing tools and frameworks were hardly ever utilizing all processors in their machines. This is due to the fact that tools they operate are only designed for single threaded situations. Tools utilizing all processors are very rare, especially for novice users. Message passing is one of the fundamental models for concurrent programming and is actually very similar to what we were already doing in our intermediate software layer and in common IOT scenarios when we are processing all our sensor data.

These situation are driving the development of Sphactor. We currently have a prototype ready for testing which we will demonstrate and talk about. Sphactor is being researched by the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht in the Netherlands for use in creative processes and as a educational environment for programming and interacting with new technologies. Libsphactor is developed in C using Zeromq's czmq framework. The gui is done is C++ using an Immediate Mode UI with minimal dependencies.

This research project is a continuation of research which was presented in the FOSDEM IOT devroom in 2015 and 2016.