Cron and asynchronous task execution

The web2py cron provides the ability for applications to execute tasks at preset times, in a platform independent manner (tested on Windows XP, Linux and MacOS X, but should work on any python 2.5 supported platform).

Cron functionality is defined by a crontab file (in regular crontab syntax) in your application's cron directory. This also means that every application can have a separate cron configuration and that cron config can be changed from within web2py without affecting the host OS itself.