When the requirement was given to create a web application that was merely more than an API service CherryPy was chosen. CherryPy is an HTTP Framework without all the bells and whistles of database libraries, and templating libraries. As a web service provider it’s turned out to be very fast because of the lack of the other systems.

However what is the use of a web service that doesn’t have a connected database and some minor templating views? Since Ruby on Rails is the predominate framework in our shop and only a few of use work with Python I wanted to use CherryPy in the style of Ruby On Rails so that others transitioning from RoR would be familiar.

While I’m certainly not an evangelist for RESTFul resources I do find that it has it’s place and certainly helps me contemplate what is going to happen when a request is given for certain call methods, (POST, GET, PUT) etc. The CherryPy request dispatcher uses the routes library, which fully supports RESTFul controllers.

Another consideration is how to set up your environments; development, qa, production, etc. This was kind of tricky as a few others I talked to used the PyYAML library to inject global variables throughout their libraries. I found that this doesn’t have to be the case. Why bloat your application with another library with knowing when to import your controllers will allow you to have all that you need within standard CherryPy config.

When setting up your CherryPy application in a manner of the MVC framework you need to have the folder structure. I’ve included a downloadable zip that includes the folders neccessary for this post and subsequent posts. You’ll clearly see that it arranges every system rationally for easy look up and organisation. The key however is in the deploy.py file as it is the start and stop script for your application.

Feel free to download the CherryPy Example 1 file and get a feel for where I am going with the subsequent posts. Subsequent posts are going to cover everything from A-Z on setting up a RESTFul CherryPy application that you can daemonize for a really fast API server that is light on the templating side.

Tags: application, cherrypy, Programming, Python, web site, website