baseplane: In software development, a set of tools, systems, patterns and designs that allow a system to be easily transferred to many back ends, services or front ends using standards, patterns and ideally non platform specific tools. Typically the baseplane includes both open standards and market standards based on industry usage. A baseplane may also be a way to commonize output to allow better designer and developer production.

A baseplane is a word I termed to describe the current, most technologically advanced set of tools and patterns that are usable across all major programming platforms.

The idea is that a company or programmer is sometimes held hostage by a particular platform or developer mindshare. People loving a good competition boast about platforms over other platforms and how one is better than the other. It is all fun and games but it doesn’t really give you the ‘best’ patterns and solutions. By patterns I mean general patterns not design patterns specifically for OO programming.

The ideal situation is where software is built semantically and from user perspectives with simplified enterprise entities and collections that perform top notch in a data store, no matter the platform or the language used to create it.

That is where true solutions begin, when companies and individuals can use the best platform or framework no matter their legion. A baseplane is a way to create systems that work well in many systems.

For instance JSON is a great example, this allows a layer to make back ends any language and then the front end any presentation from apps, to web to flash to whatever.

There will be more on this but the tools on this site all have this in mind.