Why Cyclone3?

Cyclone3 was created using Perl5 because for its broad selection of libraries, good performance and integration with the operating system. We wanted to create more than just a web publisher and our experience with Perl5 from previous similar projects was very positive so we decided to use Perl5 exclusively. Per is flexible and proved to be suitable to implement various tasks efficiently, thats why we use Perl. Additionally our goal is to push the project into Perl6. We believe Cyclone3 will be the first publishing framework implemented in Perl6 and running on the Parrot VM.

MySQL has proven to be stable and respected database solution frequently used for CMS project. We have chosen MySQL as the primary database but thanks to Perl DBI we can integrate other databases as well(EEG. Oracle or PostgreSQL ). This helps to integrate 3rd party solutions - Cyclone3 currently integrated many solutions based on Oracle databases (EEG. ERP systems).

One of the main goals of the project is to support multiple hardware platforms so we decided to use POSIX like OS's which implement Perl and solve portability issues for us as we do not want to spend additional resources on portability. Our development environment is an up to date Gentoo Linux system but we use FreeBSD on deployed servers. Cyclone3 should work on Windows but we never tested it as there is no reason to.

Developers of Cyclone3 daily work with Cyclone3 framework on commercial projects and custom solutions. For five years we have created commercial project raging from small websites to giant portals which generated millions of pages daily. There are projects implementing connections to ERP systems used to implement robust business solutions. While the life cycle of its open source version just started it is already fully matured and proven framework for many projects.

New technologies often come with many advantages which include increased development comfort and new possibilities therefore we try to support them. If you like semantic strength of DocBook, SVG graphs, modern solutions based on AJAX and XUL technologies than Cyclone3 is for you. Developers of Cyclone3 even cooperate with OpenDocument Fellowship on tools for OpenDocument to XHTML conversions.

Cyclone3 is constantly evolving, new features are implemented, new applications created. Therefore Cyclone3 installations support upgrading and migration of projects so you can keep your work up-to-date with the development. Developers always keep backward compatibility because they themselves run allot of projects that would need modifications. If for some reason backwards compatibility must be broken the system will mail report the exact location and information about the fix to he project manager.

One installation of the Cyclone3 framework is enough for any number of independent projects. All projects will share the framework so maintaining it will be much simpler. Every Cyclone3 service can be customized per project so custom solutions will not affect other projects. It is possible to create projects which use common resources. If you need to customize any aspect of the framework you just need to copy the adequate library into the project directory and modify it.