A Carbon Application (cApp) is a collection of artifacts, which can be deployed on a Carbon instance (for example, the WSO2 Data Services Server) to easily port your Web services based solution from one environment to another.
When developing solutions using the WSO2 Carbon platform, there can be many artifact types used in it. For example, Axis2 services, Synapse artifacts (endpoints, Proxy Services, mediators, etc. ), Registry Resources, Data Services, etc. Normally these artifacts are developed in a development environment and then moved one by one into the staging and production environments. On each and every setup, you have to manually configure these artifacts in order to build up the entire solution. This is a time-consuming process.
Carbon Applications save time by providing the facility to export your entire solution as a single cApp artifact and simply deploy it in the server. WSO2 Web services development tooling environment (Carbon Studio) can be used to develop your individual artifacts and export them as a single cApp artifact. You can then deploy it on any Carbon server which has cApp deployment capabilities.