The specification relies heavily on the Inversion of control principle, in order to make it easier for application components to discover and interact with each other.

Colony aims to eliminate the complexity typically associated with the creation of modular applications, through a simplified unified model for component development.

This also includes use cases to which MEF caters, such as adding modularity to an existing application, without the developer having to create its own plugin infrastructure from scratch.

Notable components include a complete web application framework, based on the MVC architecture pattern, similar to Ruby on Rails and Django.

In practice this implies that even core HTTP server components, such as filesystem access and socket interfaces, are provided as modules and can be hot-swapped.

For integration with other technologies, Colony provides servers and clients for common protocols such as SMTP, BitTorrent, DNS, IRC, POP, Telnet, XMPP, LDAP as well as support for Bonjour (Apple Inc.'s implementation of Zeroconf).