ofxPlasma

An openFrameworks addon to integrate Oblong Industries' Plasma. Tested on Ubuntu 20.04.

This addon lives here: https://github.com/naturalinteraction/ofxPlasma.git

The included license is that of Plasma. You can freely use ofxPlasma as you wish.

The easiest way to learn how to use this addon is to look at the included /example.

This has been put together by me (Alessandro Valli, naturalinteract at gmail.com) and has nothing to do with Oblong Industries, Inc.

What is Plasma?

Plasma is an open-source system for platform- and language-independent data encapsulation and transmission.

It can be found here: https://github.com/Oblong/plasma

Arbitrarily complex -- in the senses of aggregation and nesting -- data structures are represented by objects called 'Slawx' (the plural of 'Slaw') and, when intended for cross-process relay, by elaborated Slawx called 'Proteins'. Slawx and Proteins are schemaless but self-describing, meaning that a recipient can interrogate any of these objects to discover its structure, the component data types at each sublocation, and of course the data itself.

A process deposits Proteins into, and retrieves Proteins from, network-soluble ring buffers called 'Pools'. Multiple processes can be simultaneously connected (via 'Hoses') to a single pool, with each both depoisiting and retrieving Proteins. The ordering of Proteins stored in a Pool is monotonic and immutable, such that all retrieving processes observe the same sequence. Processes most typically read from Pools in something like real time, with Proteins being retrieved immediately after being deposited; but Pools are also 'rewindable' so that, for example, a new process joining a distributed system might attach to a Pool already in use and begin reading Proteins from a time far enough in the past to be able to reconstruct system context.

The Plasma framework embodies a philosophy of system design that appeals to an endocrinology (rather than telegraphy) metaphor. The name 'Plasma' accordingly refers not to the superheated, ionized stellar substance but rather to the liquid medium by which biological organisms' messaging molecules are transported and diffused.

building the thing

(see up-to-date instructions in the plasma repository)

Building Plasma requires:

• ninja-build
• cmake
• libyaml (libyaml-dev libyaml-cpp-dev)
• boost
• icu4c (libicu-dev)
• openssl

Use your package manager (brew, apt, yum, zypper, etc) to install them.

To build on linux/intel mac, assuming you're in the same directory as this README:

• sudo apt-get install libyaml-dev libyaml-cpp-dev ninja-build libicu-dev cmake libavahi-client-dev libavahi-core-dev libicu-dev
• mkdir build
• cd build
• cmake -GNinja ..
• ninja
• sudo ninja install will create /include and /share

Support

• Tested on Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS + openFrameworks 0.11.2-master