Despite not getting nearly the blog-post luvin’ that some of my other projects get, Cypress is one of the longest-running and most interesting pieces of code I work on. Time to spread the love around.

Cypress: not just another Python web framework.

In fact, despite being written to host a content management system for Community2.com, Cypress isn’t a web framework at all. Cypress is a new kind of framework, one targeted at three specific problems we encountered while developing C2:

  • Having to restart Apache sucks. Whenever we change one of the static modules that power C2, we have to restart Apache. Now, I’ve heard that mod_perl is supposed to detect when your modules change and reload them automatically, but I’ve never been able to get it working, nor has anyone I know, and even if we could get it working, we wouldn’t use it.

    Why not just let mod_perl reload the modules? Because mod_perl reloads only the modules that have changed, not those that, say, cache instances of classes defined in the changed modules. This leads to cache poisoning, where your object cache has instances of both the new and old versions of the class. Cypress fixes this.

  • Lack of real revision control sucks. Storing code in a database (the way the Everything Engine does) means you lose all the power that comes with a real revision control system. While Everything tries oh-so-desperately to make up for this with a half-assed versioning system, it just can’t compete with the likes of darcs or SVK.

    Cypress moves code out of the database and back under strong revision control, back where it belongs. Cypress is able to pull modules directly from revision control, and thanks to Cypress’ highly flexible architecture, you can have it work with any RCS you can imagine.

  • One of the big problems we encountered with C2 is that there were other sites on the same server that used the Everything Engine. Because they all used the same set of modules, this meant that we couldn’t go changing things willy-nilly to suit C2. Cypress, again, fixes this.

I’m hoping to have Cypress ready sometime this decade, which seems to be a pretty slip-proof deadline.

While there’s no official website for Cypress, interested viewers can use the WebSVN viewer to watch the project’s progress.