Tapestry is a set of experiments in developing a multi-scheme "clearing and settlement mechanism" (CSM) for account to account payments between "payment service providers" (PSP) such as banks and other financial institutions. Tapestry is not production quality software. It is best understood in the tradition of operating systems developed to teach computer science concepts. Minix and Xv6 are examples of Unix-like teaching operating systems.
With Tapestry the teaching objective is "payments engineering" and the target audience is software engineers who have at least some practice in software development, but little or no exposure to financial technology in general and payment systems in particular. The Tapestry source code is designed to illustrate concepts in payment systems through running code. By exploring and modifying the Tapestry source code, a software engineer can develop a more intuitive understanding and mental models of how payments work. developing this type of understanding with production systems is more difficult due to system complexity and often high degree of legacy code. Furthermore, access to production payment systems is naturally rather limited unless one is employed at a financial institution.
Tapestry has been developed as part of a Master's Thesis project in Computer Science at the University of Helsinki. It is the idea that the Tapestry code is explored with the thesis document as a companion. Payment systems and related concepts are covered at some length in the thesis.
Online version of the Tapestry documentation is available at https://toivotuo.github.io/tapestry-docs/
FIXME: Add a link to the online version of the thesis here once it is submitted for review.
What's in the name? See "Star Trek: TNG (S6E15)".