TickingMachine is a Plone product built using Archetypes and Zope3 framework. It adds the notion of a 'server tick' which is, basically, a simple time event triggered at specified intervals (set with
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a custom portal tool - portal_tickingmachine). This subsystem uses the observer pattern and zope3 events, which means that other subsystems can subscribe to it and get notified each time a tick takes place (thus being able to perceive the time flow and react to it by performing some actions).
The TickingMachine needs an external clock source. You can use the cron daemon, Zope ClockServer or whatever you wish as long as it can invoke a tick() method of the TickingMachine portal tool (e.g. by accessing it via HTTP(s) with its URL). [Less]