application-services/README.md

Firefox Application Services

A platform for building cloud-powered applications that target Firefox users

What's this all about?

This repository hosts the code and docs needed to integrate with the products offered by the Firefox Application Services team.

If you are interested in getting involved in the development of those products then you're in the right place! Please review the more detailed guide on how to contribute to this project as well as the Community Participation Guidelines.

If that's not why you're here, then instead you might enjoy:

• The Application Services Product Portal, if you're looking to use those products in your application.
• The Application Services Team Home on Mana, if you're trying to find out more about how we build them.

Overview

This repository is used to build client-side libraries for integrating with Firefox Application services such as Firefox Accounts, Firefox Sync and Push. Each of these is called a "component" and is built using a core of shared code writen in Rust, wrapped with native language bindings for different platforms.

The end result is an application that can be assembled from re-usable components that are largely shared across platforms, like this:

The code for these components is organized as follows:

• ./libs/ contains infratructure for building some native dependencies, such as NSS.
• ./components/ contains the source for each component, and its FFI bindings.
  • See ./components/logins/ for an example, where you can find:
    • The shared rust code.
    • The mapping into a C FFI.
    • The Kotlin bindings for use by Android applications.
    • The Swift bindings for use by iOS applications.
• ./megazords/ contains infrastructure for bundling multiple rust components into a single build artifact called a "megazord library" for easy consumption by applications.

For more details on how the client libraries are built and published, please see the Guide to Building a Rust Component.

This repository also hosts the website source for the Application Services Product Portal, which provides consumer-facing documentation on how to integrate with various Application services products.

The ./docs/ directory holds intenal documentation about working with the code in this repository, and is most likely only of interest to contributors.

Components

The currently-available Rust Components in this repo are:

• fxa-client - for applications that need to sign in with FxA, access encryption keys for sync, and more.
• sync15 - shared library for accessing data in Firefox Sync
• logins - for storage and syncing of a user's saved login credentials
• places - for storage and syncing of a user's saved browsing history
• push - for applications to receive real-time updates via WebPush
• rc_log - for connecting component log output to the application's log stream
• support - low-level utility libraries
  • support/ffi - utilities for building a component's FFI bindings
  • support/sql - utilities for storing data locally with SQL