# About this guide

This guide contains information about extending the Endeca Discovery Framework on Windows and Linux. It also introduces the Discovery Framework Component SDK.

The Discovery Framework enables rapid configuration of dashboard applications that offer the highly interactive Guided Navigation® user experience across a full range of structured and unstructured enterprise data.

The Discovery Framework is easy to deploy and ideal for the agile development of enterprise-quality applications. Due to component-based nature of the Discovery Framework, these applications are simple to control, adapt, and extend. It provides granular layout and configuration control to enable users to manage and personalize their own experiences.

The Discovery Framework consists of an enterprise-class portal framework and a library of UI components that embody best practices in Endeca applications. In addition, it includes a Component SDK, which is a packaged development environment for portlets, themes, layout templates, and other portal element. Endeca has modified Liferay's version of its Plugins SDK to include the Endeca enhancements, such as the EndecaPortlet core class.

Related information
Extending the Discovery Framework
Security extensions to the Discovery Framework
Managing data source state in the Discovery Framework
Installing and using the Component SDK
Localizing the Discovery Framework