Design

Stakeholders

Groundwork is primarily targeted to Developers to make it easier to develop federated applications, especially ones that target specialized business domains.

Stakeholder	Key benefits
Developer: Primary stakeholder. Anyone that wants to build modular domain-specific application services that can be federated and are compliant to Fediverse open-standards.	Focus primarily on the feature set that matter to the application domain. Service platform handles the complexity of providing federation support, production-ready server features. Develop service modules in the languages you are most comfortable with.
Provider: Secondary stakeholder. Party that offers an application or add-on, packaged as service modules.	Modularize your application in ways that fit your business model. Host your application on a stable platform that eases service management. Integrate and extend your application with additional service modules developed by third-parties.
Sysadmin: Person responsible for maintaining a Groundwork server and its service module deployments.	Install, configure, and operate via a set of intuitive maintenance procedures. Stay in control, monitor health metrics and usage data in your admin dashboard. Consult great documentation about new platform releases and available service modules. Upgrade with ease.
Host: Indirect (not shown in domain model). Party that provides Groundwork as a service platform.	Offer a production-ready Groundwork instance to Providers as a full-blown application platform. Multi-tenancy. Provide subscription plans to Tenants (not part of the MVP).
Fedizen: Indirect (not shown in domain model). Person with accounts on the service platform.	Has full control to manage their presence on the platform. Uses the application features offered by the platform Provider.

Application domains

Apart from the layering presented above there are four functional areas, or application domains:

Domain	Description
Groundwork Core	Common server features, such as configuration, logging, identity and authentication, security, federation endpoints, and more.
Groundwork Service Modules	Framework for creation of dynamically loaded Service Modules. This includes bootstrap projects to jumpstart development.
Groundwork Service Administration	Facilities for Sysadmins and Providers to deploy and manage Service Modules at runtime.
Groundwork Account Management	Facilities for managing Member Accounts on the platform.

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