# \_index ## What is Orbit? Orbit is a framework to write distributed systems using virtual actors on the JVM. A virtual actor is an object that interacts with the world using asynchronous messages. At any time an actor may be active or inactive. Usually the state of an inactive actor will reside in the database. When a message is sent to an inactive actor it will be activated somewhere in the pool of backend servers. During the activation process the actor's state is read from the database. Actors are deactivated based on timeout and on server resource usage. It is heavily inspired by the [Microsoft Orleans](https://github.com/dotnet/Orleans) project. ## Documentation The Orbit documentation is located on this site. Please see the sidebar for navigation. ## Source Code & Other Projects The core orbit framework and runtime code is located in the [orbit/orbit](https://github.com/orbit/orbit) project. ## Sample Application A sample application has been built to demonstrate the most common scenarios for integrating with an Orbit Server at [orbit/orbit-sample](https://github.com/orbit/orbit-sample) --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://docs.orbit.cloud/docs/content/_index.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.