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How to Consume Sail

You know what FDC3 is and what Sail does. This page is the decision point: there are three ways to bring Sail into your organisation, and they are at different stages of readiness. Each is marked [implemented] or [planned] using the same convention as the Architecture Overview — never read a [planned] path as something you can use today.

Path 1: Compose the pieces yourself [implemented]​

Construct a Desktop Agent directly inside your own web application — your state management, your persistence, your UI — and let Sail supply the FDC3 engine and browser connection layer underneath it.

Construct the FDC3 engine with new SailDesktopAgent({...}) from @finos/sail-browser-agent. That agent speaks FDC3 2.2 and 3.0 (negotiated per app at WCP hello). If you also want workspaces, layouts, and pluggable persistence for your host's own state, add @finos/sail-platform — the two are peers you compose, not layers. See the Architecture Overview — How the packages compose for the join between them and the diagram; this page does not repeat it.

Start here: Getting Started.

Path 2: Serve an example shell [implemented]​

Deploy one of Sail's own shells instead of building a host yourself. These are example UIs — working, deployable applications that show what the platform can be built into. Run one as-is, or take it as the starting point for your own. Sail ships two, and the difference between them is domain, not maturity:

  • sail-finance — a finance-specific example: a workspace-and-panel dashboard aimed at financial desktop workflows.
  • sail-one — a domain-neutral example for more general use: a tab-and-grid canvas with channel wiring.

Both are real applications on the same engine, each constructing SailDesktopAgent directly. Neither is more finished than the other; pick the one whose domain and layout are closer to what you need, and expect to customise. See Architecture Overview for how the shells relate to the engine.

Start here: Run Sail covers the sail-finance deployment path in detail, including build, hosting, and app-directory setup — see also @finos/sail-finance. A sail-one deployment guide is not yet published in these docs; until it is, packages/sail-one/README.md in the repository is the current reference.

Path 3: Use a hosted version [planned]​

A hosted instance of a Sail shell — so you could point users at a URL instead of deploying anything yourself — is an intended direction. It does not exist yet. There is no hosted address for either sail-one or sail-finance today, and who would operate one has not been decided. If you need Sail now, choose Path 1 or Path 2 above.