11 posts tagged with "Architecture"

An AI agent needs memory. Most approaches reach for vector databases and similarity search. In .orb, memory is just another Orbital Unit with entities, traits, and state machines.

Ever opened a modal and could not close it? That is a broken circuit. The .orb compiler makes it impossible to build one.

In .orb, Orbital Units communicate through events. Each unit declares what it emits and what it listens to. The compiler verifies the wiring is complete. This is how you compose complex behavior from simple, independent parts.

Five boolean flags create 32 possible state combinations. Most are invalid. A state machine with five named states has exactly five valid states. That is the core argument for modeling UI behavior in .orb.

Authorization logic is usually scattered across components, API routes, and middleware. In .orb, guards are part of the state machine definition. One declaration, enforced everywhere.

Every configuration language eventually hits the same wall: you need logic, but your format only holds data. YAML leads to Helm chart nightmares. HCL and Dhall invent new syntax with new parsers. Jsonnet gets close but breaks JSON compatibility. Almadar took a different route: S-expressions encoded as JSON arrays, giving you a Turing-complete language that every JSON tool already understands.

A government inspection system. A personal fitness tracker. A tactical strategy game. Three completely different domains, all built with the same .orb language. The vocabulary changes across domains. The structure does not.

JSON holds data beautifully but has no answer for logic. String templates are error-prone and injectable. Custom DSLs are verbose and hard to validate. JavaScript functions are not serializable. S-expressions solve all three problems: they are structured, serializable, and executable, encoded as plain JSON arrays.

What if you defined your entire application in a single file before writing any component code? Not just the database model, but the state machines, the UI structure, the routes, and the business rules. That is how .orb works: write the schema, validate it, compile it, run it.

The same .orb file runs in the browser via an interpreter, compiles to a native Rust binary, and generates production TypeScript or Python code. Three execution models from one source of truth, each optimized for its environment.