Architecture

Overview

This section of Sugar's Developer Guide begins with a high-level overview of the Sugar platform's architecture and contains documentation on granular concepts in Sugar such as logic hooks, caching, logging, extensions, job queue, and more.

Please continue to the bottom of this page or use the navigation on the left to explore the related content.

Platform

Sugar® is built on open standards and technology such as HTML5, PHP, and JavaScript, and runs on a variety of free and open-source technology like Linux, MySQL, and Elasticsearch. The Sugar platform also supports common proprietary databases such as Oracle, IBM DB2, and Microsoft SQL Server.

All of Sugar's customers and partners have access to source code that they can choose to deploy on-premise or utilize Sugar's cloud service for a SaaS deployment.

Out of the box, Sugar uses a consistent platform across all clients and devices (e.g. mobile, web, plug-ins, etc.).

Front-End Framework

Our clients are based on a front-end framework called Sidecar. Sidecar is built on open source technology: Backbone.js, jQuery, Handlebars.js, and Bootstrap. The Sidecar framework provides a responsive UI (to support a variety of form factors) and uses modern, single-page client architecture. Sugar clients connect to Sugar server application via our client REST API. The REST API is implemented in PHP and drives server-side business logic and interacts with a database. If it can be accomplished via one of our clients, then its equivalent functionality can be accomplished using our REST API.

The Sugar platform uses modules. Modules are a vertically integrated application component that is traditionally organized around a single feature or record type (or underlying database table). For example, contact records are managed via a Contacts module that contains all the business logic, front-end interface definitions, REST APIs, data schema, and relationships with other modules.

Custom modules can be created and deployed as needed in order to add new features to a Sugar application instance. 

Metadata

Sugar's modules are defined primarily using Metadata. There are two types of metadata definitions within Sugar: Vardefs, which define the data model for Sugar modules; and Viewdefs, which define the user interface components that are used with a module.

Sugar Metadata is implemented as PHP files that can be modified directly by a Sugar Developer making filesystem changes, or indirectly through the use of Sugar Studio and Module Builder by a Sugar Administrator.

Metadata allows you to configure solutions instead of having to write countless lines of custom code in order to implement common customizations such as adding custom fields, calculated values, and changing user interface layouts.

Extensions

Beyond metadata, Sugar is highly customizable and includes an extensive Extensions Framework that provides Sugar Developers the capability to contribute to pre-defined extension points within the application in a way that is upgrade-safe and will not conflict with other customizations that exist in the system.