What is ACT?

ACT is an in-progress prototype distributed, self-deploying application-server for the federated web.

It is built to enable a gradual transition from no-code to full-code deployment of anything from static websites to complex meshes of distributed functionality. You can build ACT sites with text files and git, via an admin panel in the app itself. You can deploy pure content-based sites, or you can extend the code in Ruby or Javascript.

ACT treats AI integration, federation, queuing, job execution, follower and following relationships, publication, subscription, user management and distributed permissions as core concepts, creating a more social, distributed solution from the start - and automatically - than you ever thought about building.

ACT can deploy itself: You build and test in or alongside ACT (allowing you to start simple, but also work within teams), then you choose where and how to deploy, and your dev instance installs or updates a production version of itself in your choice of cloud environment, managed server provider, or VPS. The minimum requirement is an SSH key to a suitable Linux server with Systemd, or keys for any hosting provider supported by Fog

ACT can maintain itself - mutable data can be synced across multiple ACT instances to ensure failover and durability, and ACT knows how to register itself with load-balancers to ensure failover.

But ACT also works within your devops infrastructure - all you need is the ability to deploy a Docker container and a persistent volume for the database.

ACT only requires a single, fixed Docker image - the rest can be deployed as single images of your enhancements - but you can also bake your enhancements into your own Docker image.

Availability

ACT is currently available only in limited versions as part of Hokstad Consulting tooling for our clients. Parts of ACT will be used for SaaS offerings coming over the coming year. A full version of ACT will eventually be available to be licensed by anyone, but no timeline has been decided for available outside of our existing customer-base.

Only a few sites we're using as testbeds, such as this site, are publicly accessible.