What's ZOPE anyway?

[Oleg Broytmann]

On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, Jayr Magave wrote:
> I went through www.zope.org and read everything I could, and found the
> following definition:
> 
> "Zope is an Open Source application server and portal toolkit used for
> building high-performance, dynamic Web sites. "
> 
> ... and the rest of the page goes on to describe ZOPE.
> 
> I am sorry, but what's ZOPE? :-)
> 
> Any code snipplet? Is this a language extension to Python?
> 
> Thanx,
> 
> Jair

   Zope is not a language or language extension. It is application server.
   Let look into it in a little more details.

   Zope consists of few components - all of them written in python.

   There is DocumentTemplates - powerful mechanism to separate data and
presenation.

   There is Object Database - OO database.

   There is Object Publisher - mechanism to publish python objects on the
web.

   And there is PCGI Server - a way to implement Persistent CGI. Persistent
CGI does not fork off HTTP server on every call, but lives in memory for a
while.

   All these components can be used independently. I, for example, use
ZTemplates in some projects, and I am very sorry I hadn't learned earlier -
ZTemplates are perfect!
   But when combined in one server - Zope - these components provides an
extremely powerful platform for creating, managing, programming web-sites.
Zope, e.g., provides so called "aquisition" - name searching mechanism,
which allows context-dependent rendering. And so on.

   There are some more, but these are basic Zope components.

Oleg.
---- 
    Oleg Broytmann        Netskate/Inter.Net.Ru        phd at emerald.netskate.ru
           Programmers don't die, they just GOSUB without RETURN.