The parent archetype is defined to be the root of all nested modules (generated by the others archetypes).
Your first step in the Osgiliath programming world is to generate a project based on this archetype, you will then be able to generate modules of the generated project with the other Osgiliath archetypes (or nested parent ones).
Feature declaration
A parent project defines more or less an application, or a big feature you want to provide.
In order to put your entire project in production environment in a single command, you’ve to describe a xml describing all the modules that must be deployed to make the application up and running.
A feature can be split into multiple subfeatures allowing you to either deploy partial app (i.e. in case of upgrade) or test a subset of your project (i.e.: you don’t have to deploy your entire app to test the exposed web services).
Here’s a sample feature.xml declaration.
Property declaration
You can also define properties that will be consumed by our applications, in order to do this, a cfg file is provided on the feature module.
Properties are defined in the key/value form