# Platform Blades

Blades are used throughout Caplin’s solutions. A blade is a re-usable software module that contains the code and resources needed to implement a business or technical feature. The Caplin Platform makes use of blades to implement features.

**📌 NOTE**\
You can also build a Caplin Trader application using blades. See [here](http://bladerunnerjs.org/docs/concepts/blades/) for more on this.

A **Platform blade** is any blade that forms part of the Caplin Platform, and therefore resides on the server. There are three types of Platform blade:

* **Config blade**: This type of blade consists solely of configuration for the Platform’s core components ([Liberator](../liberator/index.md) and/or [Transformer](../transformer/index.md)).
* **Adapter blade**: This type of blade connects to, and supplies data to, a Liberator and/or Transformer. It consists of: 
  * An [Integration Adapter](putting-data-into-the-platform.md) (an executable binary file). Integration Adapters can be written in Java using the [Caplin Integration Suite](../cis-toolkit/index.md), or in C using the C DataSource API.
  * Configuration for the Adapter (including its [DataSource configuration](../datasource/datasource-datasource-configuration.md)).
  * Configuration for the core components (Liberator and/or Transformer). This configuration enables the Adapter to exchange data with these core components.
* **Service blade**: This type of blade contains a module written in C, Java, or Lua that is to be loaded into one of the core components; for example, a permissioning auth (authorisation) module that’s loaded into Liberator, or Transformer’s Refiner (filtering and sorting) service.

Here’s an example showing how two Platform blades are structured; an Adapter blade for FX Trading, and a Config blade for [JMX Monitoring](monitoring-and-management.md):

![b) Config blade for Liberator JMX Monitoring"](../../../images/Platform_blades_example.png)

Sometimes the implementation of a particular feature requires more than one blade, but a blade will never provide more than one feature. You can switch a feature on and off by activating and deactivating the blade or blades that provide it. The Caplin Platform Deployment Framework is supplied with several built-in configuration-only blades. The Framework also provides configuration that supports [failover of components](../deployment-framework/cdf-set-up-server-failover-capability.md).

[_Learn more about using Caplin Platform Blades and the Caplin Platform Deployment Framework..._](../deployment-framework/index.md)