Once your development environment is set up, architectural decisions have been made, and your project shell is ready you can begin writing the business logic to support your application. This involves determining the user interaction and work flows for your application and how these affect the reading, writing, modification and deletion of system data.

Most of the data-related APIs follow a pattern. The data objects themselves (the Java representations of courses, users, enrollments, grades, etc) appear in the blackboard.data.* packages. The methods used to load and persist these data objects appear in the blackboard.persist.* packages. In addition, there are various services and manager classes that can be used to access additional contextual and configuration data.