What Is Zongsoft?

Understand the composition, positioning and applicable scenarios of the Zongsoft open source framework series.

Zongsoft is a set of open source frameworks, hosts and toolchains for .NET application development. Its core capabilities revolve around plugin-based applications: the host is only responsible for establishing the running environment, and business capabilities are deployed to the host through plugins, configurations, data mapping and ancillary resources.

Components

Framework

Zongsoft/framework is the framework code repository, including core class library, plugin framework, data engine, Web basic library, security, diagnostics, message queue, automatic upgrade and third-party service adaptation.

Hosting

Zongsoft/hosting provides three types of hosts: terminal, background service and Web. The host itself does not carry business logic. They load the plugin manifest in the plugins/ directory through the plugin framework to form an application.

Tools

Zongsoft/tools provides deployment and packaging tools, including dotnet-deploy, dotnet-pack, and regular expression GUI tools. The automatic upgrade packager dotnet-upgrade is located in the upgrading/tool directory of the framework repository.

Applicable Scenarios

Zongsoft is more suitable for business systems that require long-term evolution, clear module boundaries, and diverse deployment forms. For example:

• Backend services combined with multiple business modules.

• Large applications whose capabilities need to be composed by site, environment, customer, or deployment configuration.

• A system that integrates common capabilities into plugins and reuse them across projects is needed.

• .NET applications that require deployment, installation packages, and automated upgrade processes.

Relationship to Common Frameworks

Zongsoft, like ABP, is a system that favors complete application frameworks and toolchains, but its organizational focus is more toward "plugin-based applications runtime". When reading this document, you can first understand Zongsoft as:

1. A set of basic development abstractions.

2. A model for plugin-based applications.

3. A set of host templates.

4. A set of deployment, packaging and upgrade tools.