I keep seeing “bootstrapping” mentioned in discussions of application development. It seems both widespread and important, but I’ve yet to come across even a poor explanation of what bootstrapping actually is; rather, it seems as though everyone is just supposed to know what it means. I don’t, though. Near as I can figure, it has something to do with initialization tasks required of an application upon launch, but I could be completely wrong about that. Can anyone help me to understand this idea?
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An example of bootstrapping is in some web frameworks. You call index.php (the bootstrapper), and then it loads the frameworks helpers, models, configuration, and then loads the controller and passes off control to it.
As you can see, it’s a simple file that starts a large process.