About This Guide

The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines for implementing Application Provisioning Standard (APS) on the side of hosting services providers.

The document is intended for developers of hosting provider software who want to develop APS engine, or Controller, - a part of hosting provider software processing APS site applications in full compliance with the rules defined by the standard.

Abbreviations, Definitions and Conventions

APS is used instead of Application Packaging Standard in some long sentences where using it will not change the meaning of the sentence.
Hosting Environment is an environment that provides resources or equipment needed to host a service. For example, web site and virtual machine.
Web site is a collection of web pages, typically common to a particular domain name or sub-domain on the World Wide Web on the Internet.
Control panel or CP is hosting provider software designed for managing user accounts, web sites and site applications.
Site application or application is a Web application that can be hosted on a web site.
Application Package or Package is a site application in its distribution format which includes all application and application-related files created, structured and packed according to the APS.
Application Instance is a site application installed from application package on a particular web site and accessible via a unique URL.
Controller is APS engine, a control panel part responsible for processing application packages and instances.
Aspect is an additional specification that declares how to describe in the application package metadata: file technologies used by an application, application management scripts, and how these descriptions must be processed by Controllers. The technologies include any software or executable code.
Qualified technology means any software or executable code described in an aspect included in the APS: Package Format Specification.
User is any CP user who has access to the Controller's functionality.
Repository is a Controller's structural part capable of storing information about all packages that can be instantiated by the Controller.
Configuration is a set of application settings values, in whichever format it is presented in a Controller implementation.
XPath notation is used to describe the structure of XML documents and to refer to XML elements and attributes in the text.
APS: Package Format Specification is referred to as the Specification.