Programming Python, Second Edition

Zope: A Web Publishing 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 let Zope handle most of the underlying HTTP and CGI details. If you are interested in implementing more complex web sites than the form-based interactions we’ve seen in the last three chapters, you should investigate Zope: it can obviate many of the tasks that web scripters wrestle with on a daily basis.

Sometimes compared to commercial web toolkits such as ColdFusion, Zope is made freely available over the Internet by a company called Digital Creations and enjoys a large and very active development community. Indeed, many attendees at a recent Python conference were attracted by Zope, which had its own conference track. The use of Zope has spread so quickly that many Pythonistas now look to it as Python’s “killer application” -- a system so good that it naturally pushes Python into the development spotlight. At the least, Zope offers a new, higher-level way of developing sites for the Web, above and beyond raw CGI scripting.^[120]

Zope Components

Zope began life as a set of tools (part of which was named “Bobo”) placed in the public domain by Digital Creations. Since then, it has grown into a large system with many components, a growing body of add-ons ...