Application Development

Eden applications

Sahana Eden is a multi-purpose web application written for the web2py framework.

The appearance and business logic of this application can be adjusted to the needs of a particular deployment by altering settings in the models/000_config.py configuration file on the server.

Such adjustments can be minimal, or (more commonly) be extensive customization involving menus, forms, user roles, workflows, data models and even processing logic - so that Eden can be repurposed and adapted for many different use-cases and scenarios.

But rather than putting all these customizations into a server-side configuration file, they would normally be implemented as Python packages which are then imported as configuration templates. This way, complex custom configurations can be developed, tested and maintained away from the server - and can easily be shared and re-used in other deployments.

An Eden application is therefore understood as a re-usable configuration template (or a combination of templates), and Application Development is focused on such templates.

A small selection of configuration templates is included in the Eden code base. However, downstream projects will often develop their own templates, and may publish and/or market them independently - a business model which we encourage and support.