What are the other options against Zope?

[Some Fred]

On Sun, 03 Jul 2005 19:38:28 -0500, phil <phillip.watts at anvilcom.com>
wrote:
>Anyway, thanks Terry, I still don't know what Zope is but I need to
>accept that it's just a toolkit and I'm not gonna know until
>I dig in and as long as my web needs are simple, I probably won't.

Actually, I found playing with CherryPy (http://www.cherrypy.org) an
easier way to "get" Zope than digging into Zope directly. It also took
me a good while to understand what an "application server" was, for
that matter.

AFAIK, Zope can be summed up as...

- a server application that uses an object-oriented database (ZODB) to
store items (static or dynamic HTML pages, images, scripts, etc.) as
an alternative to storing data in either a SQL database and/or a
filesystem (although Zope can connect to a SQL database, if need be)

- the use of an OO-database makes it possible to map URLs to scripts
(like it's done when mapping URLs to script pages in the filesystem),
with some added benefits

- a major benefit of the ZODB is "acquisition"
(http://www.zope.org/Members/Amos/WhatIsAcquisition), ie. if an object
is not found in the "directory" pointed to in the URL, ZODB will
search for it by going up the tree all the way to the root, and either
return the object if any is found along the way, or a 404. This makes
it possible, for instance, to locate objects common to different
sections of your site at the root of the site

- scripts are mostly written in Python, since Zope is written partly
in Python, and partly in C, although Zope also supports scripts in
Perl. If you like, you can also write scripts à la PHP, ie. include
code in HTML pages, using two templating languages: DTML is the older
one, and ZPT is the more recent one.

HTH
Fred.