Assembling an application

An actual application is created by selecting desired features and customizing their configuration. This is achieved through a central configuration file, which can be easily edited through the user interface. Human-readable structure of the configuration file coupled with syntax suggestions in this step greatly simplify the development process.

Profiles may cover individual functional features, like the aforementioned timeline but others take care of the presentational aspects, like typesetting and styling. Such profiles are called themes.

Profiles may also aggregate and customize each other, so a profile may depend on one or more other profiles. At the top of such a hierarchy sits what we call a blueprint, which is essentially a ready-made configuration for a complete application. Usually it will be targeting a specific use case, e.g. a correspondence edition or a dictionary. In the simplest case, a blueprint may be just a configuration file, which tailors the configuration of profiles it uses for the specific purpose of this particular blueprint.