Credit: Dreamstime
Microsoft has made Azure Fluid Relay, a managed cloud service for building enterprise-caliber collaborative applications using the Fluid Framework, available for web developers.
Azure Fluid Relay became generally available on August 1, as did the Fluid Framework azure-client 1.0 library. Fluid Framework is an open source collection of client libraries for building low-latency, real-time collaboration applications.
These libraries allow multiple clients to create and operate on shared data structures, while developers use familiar programming patterns similar to those used to work with local data.
Azure Fluid Relay deals with Fluid collaboration details so that developers are freed to focus on the user experience. Specific features of Azure Fluid Relay include:
- Replication of state across connected JavaScript clients in real time.
- Coauthoring and data synchronisation in apps.
- Built-in Fluid server functionality for provisioning and managing collaboration.
- Cloud-native Azure storage and hosting capabilities for building secure, reliable, low-latency experiences.
- Built-in scalability.
- Designed to meet business, legal, and regulatory requirements.
Applications built with Fluid Framework require no custom code on the server to enable data sync scenarios such as real-time typing across text editors. Fluid Framework can work with straight JavaScript or a JavaScript framework such as Angular, React, or Vue.
To connect an app to Azure Fluid Relay, developers must provision a Fluid Relay server resource in their Azure account. Developers can connect a Fluid application to a Fluid Relay instance using the AzureClient in the fluidframework/azure-client package.
Microsoft has used Fluid to power collaboration in its own applications, including a new version of Whiteboard. Fluid also is being used in the Teams application.
