September 8th, 2020

Fluid Framework is now open source

At Microsoft Build we announced Fluid Framework, a new framework designed to help every developer build better collaborative applications. We’re excited to say that Fluid Framework is now available as an open source project! With Fluid Framework, developers can easily add multi-user interactivity to their apps — powered by the same code that drives collaboration in Microsoft 365 experiences for millions of users. 

Fluid Framework is built from the ground up for very low latency collaboration and synchronization. Developers using Fluid’s distributed data structures can build powerful collaborative applications using familiar programming patterns. When a user makes a change in their browser – adding a comment, editing content, pressing a button – all other users will see that change nearly instantaneously.  

To get this level of performance, Fluid Framework pushes synchronization logic to the edge and keeps the service simple. Each Fluid client is responsible for managing its own state while the Fluid service is only responsible for relaying changes to the connected clients.  

With this technology, the Fluid Framework offers developers: 

  • A client-centric application model with data persistence requiring no custom server code 
  • Distributed data structures with familiar programming patterns 
  • Very low latency

 

At Build, for example, the Fluid Framework engineering team built a puzzle demo, where thousands of users made updates to jigsaw-like puzzles in real time. Any user could see the result of thousands of small edits and updates. These high-scale and high-performance collaboration capabilities work seamlessly for nearly any productivity or creation experience.

We see the launch of the Fluid Framework as the start of a community built around developer technologies for building collaborative applications. We are in the early stages and welcome your feedback, comments, and pull requests. Check out our documentation on FluidFramework.com, the demos at FluidFramework.com/playground/ and our GitHub repository to get started.

User experience updates  

Another big element of modern collaborative experiences is the ability to embed elements anywhere content is edited – in applications like Microsoft Teams, Outlook and beyond.  We’ve been busy updating and iterating on these user experiences via fluidpreview.com and connecting those experiences in Microsoft 365. We are looking to roll out more of these scenarios soon. Afterwards, we plan to preview app developer experiences and how your applications can plug in.

We hope you take the time to explore the Fluid Framework. Our open source repo is now ready for your feedback and contributions – we look forward to hearing from you! 

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