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What is Zango?

Zango is an open source web framework for building custom business applications.

It is a Django meta-framework that takes the opinionated approach of Django one step further - by being strongly opinionated towards building custom business applications. Becuases of this opionianted approach, Zango includes a lot of additional batteries at the framework level and also supports a package ecosystem to achieve the below goals:

  • Build professional quality, maintainable applications
  • Enable faster development

To begin with, lets first understand what are custom business applications.

What are custom business applications?​

Custom Business Application are apps that are needed to support business workflows and processes that are not normally supported by available ERPs, CRMs, SaaS, etc. The main reason for this is the uniqueness of workflows to the specific business.

The common denominator that makes it a unique category includes:

  • Typically exists to support business operations/workflows
  • Typically one or more user roles collaborate on a set of objects
  • Foundation of such apps are CRUD interfaces, and workflows on objects
  • Objects are often business confidential, so there is a strong need for security and compliance

Because of the custom requirement, these apps are often required to be developed from scratch, typically utilizing one of the below tech solutions:

  • Building from scratch on web frameworks (e.g. Django, Express, etc.)
  • Proprietary full stack platforms (e.g. Salesforce Apex)
  • Low code frameworks

Why Zango?​

Some of the key challenges with the available development approaches that exist for developing custom business applications are:

  • Vendor Lock-Ins: Seen with proprietary platforms
  • Limitation on customizability: Predominant with low-code/no-code frameworks
  • Need to reinvent/re-develop fundamentals such as security, compliance, etc: Agnostic web frameworks such as Django, Laravel, Express, etc.

Our Core Principles​

Zango framework is architecured keeping in mind the key requirements of business applications. The fundamental principles that guides the development of the framework are:

  • Speed of development is paramount for business apps
  • Limitations around customizability should not stifle business innovation
  • Secuity & Compliance should not need reinventing by the app's dev teams
  • Interoperability is core for business apps
  • A median business app might become unsustainable without shared infrastructure and DevOps cost
  • With the advent of AI, app development patterns that rely on contextual coding is expected to become more efficient that the one relying on gui based configurations.