This book aims at introducing the CherryPy library at a level that should make you confident that you can use it best in your own web application. Additionally we will try to open the discussion on the design of web applications and a perspective of the domain at the time of writing the book. In a nutshell the book will explain how to get and install CherryPy in a number of common ways in the Python community, such as using setup tools and easy_install. It will also give an overview of the main and most common aspects of CherryPy. This will gently bring you into an understanding of what the library can do. It then drills down into the library features such as its HTTP capabilities, alternative URI dispatchers, and extending the library as well as its WSGI support.
This will give you a solid understanding of CherryPy, its design, and how to make the best use of it from within your own applications. The book then breaks down the layers of web development by introducing techniques and tools such as object-relational mappers, web services, and Ajax through the development of a simple blog application.
It presents the blog application objectives and boundaries, reviews the status of database handling in Python, and then explains Object-Relational Mapping. It extensively presents one of the Python ORMs called Dejavu. It also talks about REST and the Atom Publishing Protocol, both of which offer a way to design web services that can extend your web applications beyond the simple capacity of serving HTML pages. Then it introduces you to the presentation layer of the blog application, which encompasses the review of the templating engine called Kid as well as the JavaScript library called MochiKit. The book discusses Ajax and how your applications can benefit from the principles behind it. We will also see how your application can call the web services. Then, the book extensively inspects the field of testing a web application. This goes from unit testing to load testing via the functional testing aspect of it. The book finally ends by presenting different ways to deploy a web application as a stand-alone application or via well known web servers such as Apache and lighttpd.
Although some chapters do not extensively include discussion about CherryPy itself, all of them will converge towards bringing an understanding of some aspects of web application development. Hopefully this book will teach you about CherryPy and will also give you the knowledge and the desire to learn more about the topics it covers