The override system provides the possibility for an application to change the behaviour of another Innomatic application without changing the other application files. This solves a great problem when a client wants a customized version of an application when using the platform in ASP edition shared with other customers: the normal procedure is to change the application itself sharing the changes with all other domains and in some cases this is not possible since the changes are too customer-centric. Before the override system was implemented, the (bad and time comsuming) solution was to duplicate the application code and namespaces, causing a lot of other troubles, even with other applications depending on it.
The override feature is provided at application components level, and components must define, if they support overriding, how they support it. For now, only the class files and domain and root panels support this feature.
When a component is declared as overriding, it is handled differently by the application deployer code. For example, overriding class files are kept in WEB-INF/overrides/classes instead of WEB-INF/classes, and in the Innomatic core, the first directory is set in the PHP include_path with precedence over the latter.