# Sienar
Sienar is a framework for building desktop and web applications. When building web applications with Sienar, a small CMS is also available.
Sienar is designed to allow the developer to build hookable and modular applications. The basic design philosophy was loosely inspired by WordPress' hooks and plugin systems; Sienar offers similar functionality via a variety of strongly-typed interfaces, as opposed to WordPress' system of magic strings.
Sienar web apps can be built using various features of ASP.NET, such as server-rendered MVC apps, REST APIs, and Blazor WASM (coming soon). Other types of applications can be built by hacking on top of the core Sienar functionality. If you want to use a Sienar-provided backend but provide your own client-side code, you're free to do so. No official packages for JS clients like Vue or React currently exist.
Sienar native applications for desktop and mobile can be built using .NET MAUI's Blazor Hybrid (code is WIP but not yet published). Other solutions can be hacked together using core Sienar functionality.
Sienar can be used as a series of reusable components to build specific types of applications, but by including the CMS plugin, it becomes a fully functional CMS.
There are currently 3 packages that supply the core Sienar functionality.
The Sienar.Utils package supplies the foundation for Sienar. It contains all the code that is shared among different types of Sienar applications. Virtually everal Sienar package relies on Sienar.Utils.
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SQLite is a robust data storage solution, and for many types of apps - including both small web apps and most mobile/desktop apps - SQLite is perfectly fine to use in production. The Sienar.SqliteUtils package provides two straightforward utility methods. The first simply calls DbContextOptionsBuilder.UseSqlite() with a correctly formatted Data Source string. The second backs up the existing database and migrates the database to the latest version, and rolls back to the previous version if there was an error.
The Sienar.WebPlugin package provides the necessary configuration to run a Sienar app using ASP.NET Core. By using the Ssr plugin, you get a traditional MVC app with server-side rendered Razor code. By using the Rest plugin, you get MVC controllers as REST endpoints (not Minimal APIs).
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Sienar uses separate packages for supplying certain architecture-specific functionality. For example, instead of tying developers to a specific technology like EntityFramework, developers can choose to implement the IRepository interface using whatever backend they choose. Some common implementations have already been created for you, and only need to be plugged into your app.
The Sienar.Architecture.EntityFramework package supplies IRepository implementations that use EntityFramework as the backing store. This is appropriate for most web apps that use EntityFramework, as well as many desktop and mobile clients that need to store information in a database.
The Sienar.Architecture.Rest package supplies IRepository implementations that use REST APIs as the backing store. This can be useful for Blazor WASM clients and desktop/mobile clients that need to store information remotely on a web server.
The documentation can be found at sienar.io.