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Core Principles
The power and simplicity of the Simple Platform are rooted in four architectural principles. Understanding them is key to understanding the "Simple way" of building software — an approach designed from the ground up to eliminate the compromises inherent in legacy enterprise systems.
1. Schema-First Design: Your Business as Code
The Competitors' Compromise
Traditional development is a chaotic and fragile dance between application code, database schemas, and API definitions. Developers waste countless hours writing and maintaining boilerplate ORM models and database migration scripts. Inevitably, these separate sources of truth drift apart, leading to a constant stream of bugs, security vulnerabilities, and a massive maintenance burden.
The Simple Advantage
On Simple, your data model, defined in the Simple Configuration Language (SCL), is the single, authoritative source of truth. This declarative, human-readable blueprint describes your business entities, their fields, and the relationships between them. From this single source, the platform automatically and instantly orchestrates your entire stack:
- Provisions isolated, secure database and tables with perfect accuracy.
- Generates a complete, type-safe, and high-performance GraphQL API.
- Creates the foundation for user interfaces and business logic.
The result is perfect consistency, by design. Change a line in your SCL file, and your database, API, and application foundation adapt in unison.
2. Logic Runtime: Write Once, Run Anywhere
The Competitors' Compromise
Legacy platforms force developers into a state of perpetual duplication. Business logic is written once for the client-side UI in a proprietary language (like Salesforce's Aura or LWC), and then painstakingly rewritten in a different server-side language (like Apex). This inefficient process is a primary driver of project delays, budget overruns, and subtle bugs that emerge when the two implementations invariably fall out of sync.
The Simple Advantage
Simple features a Logic Runtime powered by WebAssembly (WASM). You write your business logic (Actions and Record Behaviors) once in standard Go or TypeScript. The platform then executes that exact same, sandboxed code in two places:
- On the Client: For instantaneous UI feedback, dynamic forms, and real-time validation in the browser without a network roundtrip.
- On the Server: As the final, authoritative step to guarantee data integrity before committing to the database.
The result is absolute consistency and performance. You eliminate an entire class of bugs caused by client-server divergence. You get maximum code reuse and guaranteed data integrity, all running at near-native speed in a secure sandbox.
3. Composable by Design: Build with Reusable Components
The Competitors' Compromise
Monolithic enterprise software is the enemy of agility. On platforms like SAP or ServiceNow, customizing a core process or building a new feature is a complex, high-risk endeavor that can take months. The system is a tangled web of interdependencies where a small change can have unforeseen, catastrophic consequences.
The Simple Advantage
The Simple Platform is built on the principle of composability. Everything is a self-contained, reusable component with a well-defined interface:
- SCL files define composable data models.
- Actions (WASM) encapsulate reusable business logic.
- UI Components create consistent user experiences.
This allows you to build sophisticated, enterprise-grade applications by assembling simple, proven components. It's not just building software; it's composing solutions.
The result is unmatched agility. You can develop and iterate on complex applications with incredible speed, reusing battle-tested components to ensure quality and consistency without the fear of breaking the entire system.
4. Secure by Design: Enterprise-Grade Security at Every Layer
The Competitors' Compromise
In many multi-tenant SaaS platforms, security is a layer of application logic, not a fundamental part of the architecture. Customer data is often co-mingled in shared databases, protected only by software queries that are prone to human error and misconfiguration. This fragile model presents a constant, unacceptable risk.
The Simple Advantage
The Simple Platform was architected from the ground up to be Secure by Design.
- True Multi-Tenancy: Every tenant's data is housed in a completely separate, dedicated, and cryptographically isolated database. Cross-tenant data access is architecturally impossible.
- Centralized Secrets Management: All sensitive credentials, from database passwords to third-party API keys, are managed through a central, secure vault, never hardcoded in application logic.
- Principle of Least Privilege: Services and custom logic run in a Zero-Trust environment, granted only the minimum permissions necessary to perform their function.
The result is trust by default. World-class security is not an option or an add-on; it is built into the foundation of the platform. You can build with confidence, knowing your data, your logic, and your users are protected by an uncompromising security model.