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.