Introducing Softanza Web Framework (stzweb)

[Mansour Ayouni]

Hello All,

Yet another long post ;)

With 35 years of programming experience—starting at professional age 20 building WinDev software for lawyers, doctors, and others — I’ve worked across diverse business domains, technologies, and programming languages throughout Europe, Canada, Tunisia, and Africa, including critical sectors such as banking, education, industry, and government.

Business applications are my world. They are both fun and critical: their success or failure can impact thousands of people.

For a long time, I avoided the web. Web development felt artificially complex, full of anti-architectural patterns that work against flexible, well-designed business software. A major barrier for me was React-like frameworks—and JavaScript itself.

Thanks to my AI collaborators (Claude, Gemini, Qwen, Grok, and ChatGPT, each for its competitiveness skill), I was able to overcome this barrier in a fundamental way. I not only built and successfully delivered a web version of Organizium, but also created stzweb framework to empower my applications with a foundation that I fully master — one that makes sense to me ; that I can adapt, extend, and evolve further in a clean and simple way.

stzweb is built on three pillars:

• Zui: a business-aligned UI framework
• Zen: declarative, predictable JavaScript (RingScript and other scripting languages can be easily supported, both frontend and backend)
• Zql: a declarative SQL-like language to master data in business applications

Here is the kind of UI you can build immediately with stzweb.

Zui makes the right design choices for you and offers your users an out-of-the-box assistant panel, along with many practical features that business software users rely on every day.

For example, when working in a 70+-year-old bank where users come from different generations, the older ones—often the most senior and graded in the organization—may prefer a retro interface similar to the tools they are already comfortable with.

Instead of long discussions trying to convince them to adopt a modern UI, they simply press F2, and the entire application switches to a retro style, like this:

Every UI cultural flavor in Zui—whether retro for the founding fathers or modern for the X–Y generation of bank agents—comes with both Bright and Night themes, switchable instantly with a simple keyboard shortcut :  

Because a stzweb application is modeled in ZQL, a domain-specific language I made that represents business workflows, authorized business users can access the internal “brain” of the application. They can observe how workflows evolve and, when permitted, advance them directly—without going through the UI :

Programmers are also well supported by the philosophy behind the stzweb framework. Friendly tools are built in, including an automatic debugger that spares them from the complexity of browser developer tools :  

Most importantly, when business users call the IT team to fix a bug, the fix can be done immediately—not in three days, and not even in one hour.  

And they can write expressive ZQL statements to query their application data, or to create a business workflow they can bind to their business modules, without writing any JS, like this:

By experience, 75% of the work in developing modules and adapting them to business needs can be done using ZQL. And since every type of files are decoupled, you can always prompt your AI with a small file and get impressive results even in sutch a new technology on which the AI has not been trained before.

Behind all that, lies a dead-old flat file architecture, that is very clear at the point it tells the story of the app to any programmer with business software background, everything is decoupled (data from UI from business logic), and 

(1) Your project folder structure (2) Your business modules decoupled by layers (3) stzweb magic features

This is the Softanza spirit and its architectural discipline applied to taming web application complexity. Now imagine what becomes possible when RingScript or Youssaf Rust scripting tool for the web is ready, and the full power of Softanza and Ring WebLib can be used instead of JavaScript behind the Zen scripting layer of the stzweb framework...

PS: I’ll be publishing the stzweb framework on GitHub when I return home to Tunisia, so you’ll be able to try it yourself.

All the best,

Mansour

[Ilir Liburn]

Hello Mansour,

Congratulations. Impressive work and achievements.

Greetings,

Ilir

[Mansour Ayouni]

Hello Ilir,

Y'r welcome! Thanks a lot.

Best,

Mansour

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[Antonio F.S.]

Hello Mansour and everyone,

Wow!

I am pleasantly impressed with what you've previewed for us about your web framework. I've looked at it with interest and it certainly is exciting!

This group is full of geniuses with their ingenious creations. :-) :-)

Thank you very much.

Best regards,
Antonio F.S.
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El 4/2/26 a las 0:42, Mansour Ayouni escribió:

[Mansour Ayouni]

Hello Antonio,

Thank you for your kind words!

Appreciated.

All the best,

Mansour

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[Youssef Saeed]

Hello Mansour,

This is a fascinating read. It is inspiring to see how you have leveraged AI to bypass the typical barriers of web development while keeping the architecture clean. The flat-file approach and ZQL seem like excellent choices for maintainability.

Thank you for sharing.

Best regards,

Youssef