FOLIO’s architecture allows development teams to contribute innovative applications while staying within the structured environment necessary for stable, high quality software to be released. The community collaborates to define standards and operating processes that make FOLIO accessible for new development teams, and predictable for adopters.
FOLIO development follows an agile methodology to align with the priorities determined by participating community members. Longer term planning is distributed across the community and collated and communicated through the Product Council. As plans get further down the development path, teams work in sprint cycles, coordinating with each other toward a common release calendar that includes various code complete/testing milestones. A community-wide testing effort precedes each FOLIO release. Product Owners perform a key role in bridging the gap between SMEs and Developers, along with other community members who are coordinating efforts and communications.
FOLIO aspires to be a polyglot platform – many languages can be used to create functionality. As a modern built-for-the-cloud platform modules are containerized, and storage is local to the module, allowing teams some flexibility. As a practical matter, most applications’ frontend are javascript single page applications, and most backends are Java, with PostgreSQL RDBMS storage.