Montage provides digital ecosystem infrastructure that enables composable digital ecosystems to scale. It supports generic notions of packages which can form complex dependencies on other packages with diverse package technologies. Montage is designed to support and enhance existing package technologies like NuGet, Maven, pip, and others, with a focus on power and ease of use.
Montage's architecture begins with the concept of abstract packages, and then some specialized packages and concepts are introduced. The first concept is an "activity" and its corresponding "activity packages". An activity is an abstraction for a thing you want setup and configured on your system. An activity could be a workflow, a software development project, a process, or any logical thing that is represented as an ensemable of configurable and composable parts.
In the case of a software development application, the activity typically consists of a project to be built as well as all dependencies required for the project to be built. This includes dependencies inside the project, as well as dependencies required to build the project, such as build systems, integrated development environments (IDEs), and so on. The activity is the top-level concept representing a complex ensemble to be orchestrated.
Activities themselves can be created and used locally on your system. They can also be deployed as "activity packages", which allow users to install or "attach" the activity to their computer. Everything that the activity depends on to be guaranteed to build and run with no manual intervention is what the activity represents.
Ecosystems in Montage are also generic abstractions for digital ecosystems or communities. Montage's infrastructure provides generic support and consideration for the core requirements needed for ecosystems to scale and function well. This includes automated orchestration of package, package organization, documentation, and a two-sided digital marketplace to enable ecosystem contributors and consumers to interface on a two-sided platform.
The primary goal for Montage is to provide common infrastructure that can be reused across any number of ecosystems to enable digital ecosystems to thrive.
