The Boots Platform contains a number of frameworks and facilities necessary to install, update, and maintain a Partner installation, and to start and manage applications in those installations. The name was (somewhat) chosen as a reflection of the ?bootstrap? nature of many of its services (bootstrapping being a much older soldier metaphor?).
It is not particularly useful by itself (to an end-user at least), and a useful application will almost certainly require higher-level platforms as well.
However, Boots provides the fundamentals for the Partner System, and portions of it are used in any nontrivial Partner application or extension.
Here are the major subsystems: