CherryPy – WebApps with a great stuffing

I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy. I started developing web apps when Perl was something really new and revolutionary, Guido van Rossum wasn’t dealing with snakes yet and Netscape Enterprise Server was the fastest server ever. Yeah right.

In order to create apps that would interact with the web browser, you only had one option. CGI. And the so called Common Gateway Interface always worked. Personally, I still used it until quite recently. Last week recently, BTW

With the arrival of new web technologies (Rails, Django, and etc…), I studied and learned those new “formats” (BTW, I love MVC). But I always felt “restrained”. CGI is obsolete and old (most of the time), but you can do whatever you want.

We needed a new technology for one of our internal projects at @aedtech. Something that could ease the development and still be flexible, and mainly fast. After Googling a lot, I found a great solution: CherryPy.

CherryPy is a very “pythonic” HTTP framework. What really got me excited is the simplicity, the sane use of OOP and how mature the project is. The easiest way to describe how simple and nice CherryPy is, is by showing some code. Below is a little snippet from the project’s website:

import cherrypy

class HelloWorld(object):
    def index(self):
        return "Hello World!"
    index.exposed = True

cherrypy.quickstart(HelloWorld())

Easy, hum? My crazy-scientist-tests starts today, mixing this with mongoDB, Memcached and some secret sauce