Over the last few years, the boom that the World has experienced with the Internet breakthrough has pushed almost every programming language or platform to welcome the rise of web development toolkits, libraries, and frameworks.
The Python programming language has grown a rather large list of these environments
though apart from a few of them such as Zope and Twisted most have a fairly small
community. It is in this context that CherryPy came into existence when Rémi Delon, its
creator, decided that he needed a tool that would work as he wanted for his own personal
projects. He then released CherryPy under a free software license so that anyone could
use, distribute, and contribute to the project.
CherryPy is a Python library implementing the HTTP protocol, which is at the very core
of the Web, using common Python idioms. On top of that CherryPy offers its own view
and concepts on how to help a developer to build web applications while being minimally
intrusive through its own simple and straightforward API.
This book will guide you through the CherryPy library with the aim of giving you the key
to make the best of it in your own web applications.
The first four chapters are dedicated to CherryPy, providing information ranging from its
history to an in-depth presentation of its key features. The rest of the book will then take
you into the development of a photoblog application. Each chapter tries to provide enough
background to allow you to ponder the why and how of each decision made. Indeed
writing software applications is not a precise science and compromises need to be
undertaken for the better, however, the truth is that writing software usually does not go
quite as planned. I have written this book with the hope that in the end you would have
learnt much more than using a Python library.