We discuss the design and implementation of a software development platform that allows unsophisticated programmers to include advanced features to their applications with no or very little extra information and effort. These features include the splitting of the application in distinct processes that may be distributed over a network, a powerful configuration and scripting language, and several tools including an input system to easily construct reasonable interfaces. We attempt to describe both the techniques used to achieve transparency for the programmer and what exactly a user must do to build new ATLAS modules.