Fluence Labs / FOSDEM

We've seen the theory behind Aquamarine, and how it can be used to build apps. In this section we'll review the AIR language that is used to program distributed backends running on Aquamarine. We'll dive into the possibilities of the language, and some of the patterns that emerged from our experience of writing AIR scripts.

Fluence is an open application platform where apps can build on each other, share data and users. Fluence not only allows hosting services inside p2p network but also provides JS SDK for building web applications, which communicate with the services.
After the introductory talk, we will dive right into something very practical. We will demonstrate the process of making a web application with Fluence JS SDK. We will start with an empty create-react-app project and work our way towards the fully functional solution.
By the end of this talk, we will develop a text editor, which synchronizes it’s state and the user online status with collaborators over Fluence p2p network. The application will be interacting with two minimalistic services pre-deployed to Fluence: user-list and history, but all of the features will be implemented on client-side without any need to modify existing software.
Expect a lot frontend and a lot of code in TypeScript!

Aquamarine is the multi-process composition medium based on pi-calculus, designed for distributed applications/backends, both in private deployments and open networks. Aquamarine scripts define the topology of the execution (when and where to move control flow) and data dependency graph (what results and what arguments to pass where), essentially describing the composition of (micro)services, e.g. using one service's output as another service's input. The language primitives are based on pi-calculus operations describing certain topological effects and secured by cryptographic signatures of involved peers. The Aquamarine approach allows building distributed systems of any complexity, effectively expressing network behavior.

This section aims to show how a service can be created from scratch and then deployed to the Fluence network. We will start with a discussion of FCE – special runtimes that designed to run multi-module Wasm applications with help of interface-types. Then we will create several simple services and discuss how to compile, run locally, and debug them with our tooling. Finally, we will deploy these services to Fluence nodes to use them next by the front-end application.

Fluence is an open application platform powered by peer-to-peer computing protocol and a decentralized licensing system. Fluence enables developers to host applications in the decentralized network and collaborate on live applications, reusing components and data. The protocol creates an open marketplace of compute capacity, so availability and pricing are not controlled by a single company and instead are driven by competitive market forces.

Applications are faster to build, easier to integrate, and more secure due to the enhanced composability. Business logic is incorporated into data packets orchestrating the execution of distributed components. Just as code collaboration creates better products, composition via network protocol enables live apps to be forked, expanded, or re-arranged into new and enhanced user experiences.