A Gentle Introduction to The Casbah Project

The most important thing to know about The Casbah Project is that we are an Open Source project. That means that anyone can contribute to it, and anyone who wants to use it can use it free of charge with the source code included. The Open Source development model is one among many approaches to software design, but it is particularly well-suited to The Casbah Project.

So, what is Casbah? The original idea---i.e., the one that lead Niel Bornstein and Kendall Clark to found The Casbah Project in January, 1998---was to build a content management system, primarily for Web content. But we pretty quickly realized that with some additional design and programming, we could build a generalized framework for application development. We're still going to build that content management system, the desire and need for which got us all togeter in the first place, but first we're going to finish building Casbah so that other Open Source developers can use it to build their ideas too.

The basic structure of Casbah is simple, even if the implementation of it is complex: a persistent, integrated, and hierarchical core stores objects, which can be manipulated by scripting and programming languages, and input and output through a variety of drivers. Casbah is like a kind of middleware between the Web and other Internet protocols and storage devices.

There is much more to Casbah than that, but that will suffice for now. Let's look at some of the major design goals.