Technical Positioning
Technically speaking, featherlite is a so called white box framework which supports the implementation of individualized applications in the domain of planning and scheduling, control and asset management.
As such, featherlite is no runnable computer program. Rather, it provides a frame for developers to build individualized applications, defining the application control flow and allowing the developer to inject individual implementations, which extend the programming interfaces of the framework.
To that aim, featherlite supports the individualization by inversion of control. Most of the individualization is done by implementing the programming interfaces provided by the framework and inject them by configuration. Examples for this are the use of policies
and formulas to inject rules and conditions to hold in planning, scheduling and control, but also the composition of the frameworks core objects to the application specific business objects.
featherlite does not only define the application control flow. To ease development and individualization, featherlite also comes with a large set of ready to use components, which may be directly used or held as examples and guides to the developer implementation. For example, policies for common challenges (like for performing availability checks or schedule jobs to facilities or human resource with finite capacity) are part of the framework library.
To simplify the developer work, featherlite is fully transparent. Although you are not allowed to modify the framework code, the source code is visible for you to get a deeper insight and simplify trouble shooting.
For more information on software frameworks see the article on software frameworks in Wikipedia
