This is a branched release of Fabric that includes state warranties, as described in our paper "Warranties for Faster Strong Consistency", published in NSDI 2014 [5].

Fabric is a language and runtime system that supports secure federated distributed computing. This manual briefly describes the contents of the Fabric distribution package, and should get you started with running Fabric. For more information, see our paper "Fabric: A Platform for Secure Distributed Computation and Storage" published in SOSP 2009 [4].

A PDF version of this manual is available.

More information about Fabric, including the latest release, can be found at the Fabric web site.

User support and feedback

If you use Fabric, we'd appreciate your letting us know. We welcome comments, bug reports, and discussion about Fabric on the Fabric users mailing list. This is a low-traffic mailing list, to which we will also post notifications of new releases of Fabric and other related announcements.

Package contents

The Fabric distribution package contains the following directories:

bin: Scripts for invoking the compiler, runtime, and for configuration tasks. To get usage information for a script, run it with the --help option.
doc: The Fabric manual, internal API documentation, and licenses.
- doc/api: The Fabric internal API documentation.
- doc/licenses: Licensing information for Fabric and its packaged dependencies.
- doc/manual: The Fabric user manual.
examples: Example Fabric programs.
src: Source code for the Fabric compiler and runtime, and some libraries built using Fabric.
- src/compiler: The Fabric and FabIL compilers (FabIL is the intermediate language that Fabric compiles into).
- src/system: The parts of the Fabric runtime system that are implemented in Java.
- src/runtime: The parts of the Fabric runtime system that are implemented in FabIL.
- src/lib: Libraries that are built using Fabric, including the Fabric port of the Servlets with Information Flow (SIF) library [3].
etc: Configuration files for Fabric.
lib: Library dependencies for Fabric.
tools: A browser to inspect the contents of a store. A useful aid in the development of Fabric programs.