Chrome Foundation Services

Overview

This directory contains Chrome Foundation Services. If you think of Chrome as a “portable OS,” Chrome Foundation Services can be thought of as that OS' foundational “system services” layer.

Roughly each subdirectory here corresponds to a service that:

• is a client of //services/service_manager with its own unique Identity.
• could logically run a standalone process for security/performance isolation benefits depending on the constraints of the host OS.

API Standards

As illustrated above, the individual services in //services are intended for graceful reusability across a broad variety of use cases. To enable this goal, we have rigorous standards on services' public APIs. Before doing significant work in //services (and especially before becoming an owner of a service), please internalize these standards -- you are responsible for upholding them.

Service Directory Structure

Individual services are structured like so:

//services/foo/                   <-- Implementation code, may have subdirs.
              /public/
                     /cpp/        <-- C++ client libraries (optional)
                     /mojom/      <-- Mojom interfaces

Dependencies

Code within //services may only depend on each other via each other's /public/ directories, i.e. implementation code may not be shared directly.

Service code should also take care to tightly limit the dependencies on static libraries from outside of //services. Dependencies to large platform layers like //content, //chrome or //third_party/WebKit must be avoided.

Physical Packaging

Note that while it may be possible to build a discrete physical package (DSO) for each service, products consuming these services may package them differently, e.g. by combining them into a single package.

Additional Documentation

High-level Design Doc

Servicification Homepage

Servicification Strategies

Relationship To Other Top-Level Directories

Services can be thought of as integrators of library code from across the Chromium repository, most commonly //base and //mojo (obviously) but for each service also //components, //ui, etc. in accordance with the functionality they provide.

Not everything in //components is automatically a service in its own right. Think of //components as sort of like a //lib. Individual //components can define, implement and use Mojom interfaces, but only //services have unique identities with the Service Manager and so only //services make it possible for Mojom interfaces to be acquired.

Adding a new service

See the Service Manager documentation for more details regarding how to define a service and expose or consume interfaces to and from other services.

Please start a thread on services-dev@chromium.org if you want to introduce a new service.

If you are servicifying existing Chromium code: Please first read the servicification strategies documentation, which contains information that will hopefully make your task easier.