Skip to main content

Packages

The Fluid Framework is a multi-layered system consisting of dozens of individual npm packages. Most developers will only need two or three of these packages for typical Fluid development: The fluid-framework package, which contains the public API for the Fluid Framework, and a service-specific client package, such as the @fluidframework/tinylicious-client package.

Primary API: fluid-framework​

The fluid-framework package consists primarily of two portions: the [FluidContainer][] object and a selection of distributed data structures (DDSes).

FluidContainer​

The [FluidContainer][] object is the one of the object types returned by calls to createContainer() and getContainer() on the service clients such as [AzureClient][]. It includes functionality to retrieve the Fluid data contained within itself, as well as to inspect the state of the collaboration session connection.

Shared object packages​

You'll use one or more shared objects in your container to model your collaborative data. The fluid-framework package includes three data structures that cover a broad range of scenarios:

  1. SharedMap, a map-like data structure for storing key/value pair data.
  2. SharedString, a data structure for string data.

Package scopes​

Fluid Framework packages are published under one of the following npm scopes:

  • @fluidframework
  • @fluid-experimental
  • @fluid-internal
  • @fluid-tools

In addition to the scoped packages, two unscoped packages are published: the [fluid-framework][] package, described earlier, and the tinylicious package, which contains a minimal Fluid server. For more information, see Tinylicious.

Unless you are contributing to the Fluid Framework, you should only need the unscoped packages and packages from the @fluidframework scope. You can read more about the scopes and their intent in the Fluid Framework wiki.