FuseCode is ideal for applications that need to be easily extended using a distributed asynchronous team and that need to progressively and dynamically load themselves from servers. In a sense, FuseCode takes Google's notion of progressive web applications and extends that to the server side as well.
Clearly, there are security implications around doing this that developers need to be aware of, and FuseCode provides tools to manage that risk. That said, FuseCode would normally be used for applications that are either:
- Developer tools where the developer managers what plugins are loaded and takes responsibility for security (e.g.: programmers' tools).
- Programs intended to run exclusively behind the firewall and with explicitly-trusted users (e.g.: other software developers in the same team.)
This is the main launcher for an entire FuseCode application. It's compiled to an executable binary that works on Unix-like systems out of the box as long as a Java 8 or later runtime is present on the path.
Its purpose is to be small, fast, and static. All real functionality is contained in the plugin framework that it launches. To that end, its concerns are:
- To check if another instance is already running and if so to pass its command-line arguments to the running instance to be handled there. Or:
- To create the root runtime environment if it isn't already present and download or update the Bootstrap plugin. Plugins are contained in Git repositories and we use Git as the autoupdate engine.
- To launch the Bootstrap plugin in a classpath-isolated environment so that FuseCode's dependencies
cannot conflict with any plugin's classpath. By default:
- We launch the Bootstrap plugin using Clojure's Boot build tool with fullly-automatic runtime code reloading enabled. This is because FuseCode is designed to be evolved using itself at runtime to the highest degree possible.
- The default Bootstrap plugin starts a web server and provides a dynamic client and server-side programming environment, but in reality the Bootstrap plugin could do anything.
For more information on next steps, see the FuseCode Bootstrap project.