# saf
The purpose of SAF is to close a gap between the requirements of development and operation teams.
It is crucial to the efficiency of operation teams to have a rough, standardised overview of an application. It enables them to perform standard tasks (starting, stopping, deploying) without being required to dive into application-internal details. This idea was implemented with the concept of application servers.
Likewise it is crucial to the efficiency of development teams to have short development cycles and to be able to choose the most appropriate technology to implement their solution. This requirement can easily get in conflict with the concept of application servers.
SAF tries to combine these requirements by enforcing standard procedures on developer-defined standalone applications. It does so by adding a generic and customizable indirection layer (called an "overlay") between application and procedure.
The term "standalone application" in this context means "a self-contained application with no dependencies to other local to-be-maintained runtime-services" like e.g. a local web server. The application has to contain everything required to provide its service. Of course this does not apply for required remote backend services like databases.