Programming Python, 3rd Edition

Zope: A Web Application Framework

Zope is an open source web application server and toolkit, written in and customizable with Python. It is a server-side technology that allows web designers to implement sites and applications by publishing Python object hierarchies on the Web. With Zope, programmers can focus on writing objects and can let Zope handle most of the underlying Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Common Gateway Interface (CGI) details. In short, Zope is a popular and easy way to build enterprise-level web sites, whose basic structure is object oriented and whose dynamic content is scripted in Python.

Sometimes compared to commercial web toolkits such as ColdFusion, Zope is made freely available over the Internet and enjoys a large and very active development community. Indeed, many attendees at recent Python conferences were attracted by Zope, which has its own conference tracks. The use of Zope has spread so quickly that many Pythonistas have looked to it as a Python killer application—a system so good that it naturally pushes Python into the development spotlight.^[*]

Although useful by itself, Zope is also the basis of the popular Plone content management system—a way to build web sites that delegate content responsibilities to content producers, thus reducing the webmaster bottleneck. Under Plone, users may extend web site content using a workflow model. Plone is built on top of Zope and is something of a prepackaged and highly customizable Zope site (in fact, ...