A platform of platforms
Haro is called the language of languages: you declare the language of your domain, and it runs it. In the same sense, Softanza is a platform of platforms. An organisation declares its own platform, in its own words, and Softanza gives it everything a platform needs. This page says what that means, shows it running, and says how far it goes today.
What it means
Most organisations do not need one more application. A bank has a tool for its field staff, a console for its back office and a portal for its customers. A restaurant has the customer's phone, the kitchen's screen and the owner's workshop. Each is a different person on a different device, yet they share the same customers, the same rules and the same identity. The usual answer splits this into separate products glued together, or squeezes it into one host that runs small apps from a store.
Softanza's answer is that such a platform is a constellation of worlds. Each world is an application, a living world of meaning. The worlds share a common ground: identity, data, services. Declared bonds join them, rules govern every crossing, and the whole is governed as one. A world inside a constellation can itself be a constellation, so the same construction scales from a two-screen tool to a national platform.
The Softanza way A platform is not a host that runs other people's apps. It is a constellation of worlds declared in the organisation's own words, sharing one ground, joined by bonds, and governed as one.
What each one declares, and what it receives
Every platform built this way declares the same five things, as text it owns: its shared ground, a world for each person and device, the bonds between the worlds, its rules and its roles. What changes from one platform to the next is only the content: a catalogue and its taxes, a bank's regulations, an organisation's circuit of approvals, the languages its people speak.
What every one receives is the same. A grammar, and the court that judges every sentence written in it. Projection to the web, the phone, the desktop, the server and the device. Data that moves through stages with an audit trail and undo. And an agent that stands on the knowledge the platform declares, held to the same rules as the people. The platform is Softanza's; the words are the organisation's.
Running
The construction exists in the library and is judged by its own guard. Here it is, run for this page: two worlds become one platform, and then that platform becomes one world of a larger one.
Two worlds become one platform: they share a ground, the restaurant may order from its supplier because a bond declares it and governance clears it, and an action nobody declared is refused with its reason.
# two worlds: a restaurant and its produce supplier
oResto = StzAppQ("resto")
oResto.AddThingQ(:dish) { Has([ :name, :price ]) }
oSupplier = StzAppQ("supplier")
oSupplier.AddThingQ(:crate) { Has([ :produce, :qty ]) }
# one platform made of both: a shared ground, a bond, a rule
oCon = new stzSuperApp("acme-group")
oCon.AddWorld("resto", oResto)
oCon.AddWorld("supplier", oSupplier)
oCon.OpenCommonsOn(new stzDatabase(":memory:"))
oCon.StorePut("currency", "EUR")
oCon.Bond("resto", "supplier", "order-produce")
oCon.GovDeclareRisk("order-produce", 2)
oCon.GovGrant("resto", "order-produce")
oCon.GovSetAuthority("resto", :Delegated)
? oCon.StoreGet("currency")
? oCon.CallAcross("resto", "supplier", "order-produce")
? oCon.CallAcross("resto", "supplier", "raid-kitchen")
? oCon.Why()EUR 1 0 no bond declares 'raid-kitchen' from 'resto' to 'supplier'.
run on 2026-10-02 00:00 inside the library at commit 0e72e2e2c; taken from base/test/app/06_stzsuperapp_narrated.ring(opens in a new tab)
The whole platform then becomes one world of a larger one: the holding holds one world, that world is itself a constellation, and its two worlds are still inside.
# a platform of platforms: the group itself becomes one world of a holding
oHolding = new stzSuperApp("holding")
oHolding.AddConstellation("acme", oCon)
? oHolding.NumberOfWorlds()
? oHolding.KindOf("acme")
? oHolding.WorldQ("acme").NumberOfWorlds()1 super 2
run on 2026-10-02 00:00 inside the library at commit 0e72e2e2c; taken from base/test/app/06_stzsuperapp_narrated.ring(opens in a new tab)
Three platforms, one construction
RestoLean, Lyon
A platform for neighbourhood commerce, declared as a constellation. Its shared ground holds identity, the catalogue, orders, payments and the fleet of shops. On that ground stand a world for the customer's phone, one for the kitchen's screen, one for the merchant's workshop and one for the publisher's console. A bakery will be a new constellation on the same ground, not a rewrite.
Organizium, Niamey
The platform in which Softanza's web layer was born, serving the organisation of a bank, Sonibank: its structure, its processes and its indicators. Its declarations are now being written in the platform's own languages.
DIKO Hub, Niger
A design study, not a built platform: one entry point that links an organisation's existing tools without replacing any. It asks of a platform what the others asked in their own words: its own vocabulary and rules, a person who decides, everything traced, a circuit with its deadlines. What it asks, piece by piece.
Honest about the stage
- The construction is built. A world and a constellation of worlds run in the library, and the runs above come from their guard.
- One shell already carries several domains. In Softanza's applications, the same shell holds domain packs from banking to an NGO's due diligence: the same shell, a different domain, no code change.
- The customer platforms run today on ordinary web stacks, and DIKO Hub is not built. Their worlds, bonds and rules are written, or being written, as Softanza declarations, so moving them onto the Softanza engine is a change of engine, not of plan.
- No platform writes its guarantee sheet yet. The north star asks every solution for five rows, one per system it answers to: technical, social, ecological, economic and cultural. That is the next step for each of them.
The construction is described in the library's design note STZSUPERAPP_DESIGN.md(opens in a new tab) and judged by the guard 06_stzsuperapp_narrated.ring(opens in a new tab). The first two platforms are references of this site; the third is a design study. Their stories, project by project: Forged in projects.