The World of Zope

During more than a decade Zope Corp. and the Zope Community have grown an outstanding set of products and technologies, influencing the general development of Python based Web application servers and tools.

Application Servers

Zope
Zope is a Python-based application server for building secure and highly scalable web applications.

More information at zope2.zope.org

BlueBream
BlueBream – formerly known as Zope 3 – is a web framework written in the Python programming language.

More information at bluebream.zope.org

Grok
Grok is a web application framework for Python developers.

More information at grok.zope.org

Zope based CMS

Plone
Plone, the enterprise ready Content Management System based on Zope.

More information at www.plone.org

Silva
Silva is a powerful CMS for organizations that manage multiple or complex websites.

More information at infrae.com/products/silva

Databases

ZODB
The Zope Object DataBase (ZODB) is a native object database, that stores your objects while allowing you to work with any paradigms that can be expressed in Python.

More information at www.zodb.org

Tools

Buildout
Buildout is a Python-based build system for creating, assembling and deploying applications from multiple parts, some of which may be non-Python-based.

More information at www.buildout.org

Frameworks

CMF
The Content Management Framework (CMF) for Zope provides a powerful, tailorable platform for building content management applications.

More information at old.zope.org/Products/CMF/

Repoze
Repoze integrates Zope technologies with WSGI and reusable Python middleware.

More information at www.repoze.org

ZCA
The Zope Component Architecture.

More information at wiki.zope.org/zope3

ZPT
Zope Page Templates is Zope's templating mechanism.

More information at docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/AppendixC.html

ZTK
The Zope Toolkit (ZTK) is a set of libraries intended for reuse by projects to develop web applications or web frameworks.

More information at docs.zope.org/zopetoolkit/

A Bit of History

In 1996 Jim Fulton, now Zope Corporation CTO, was drafted to teach a class on common gateway interface (CGI) programming, despite not knowing very much about the subject. CGI programming is a commonly-used web development model that allows developers to construct dynamic websites. Traveling to the class, Jim studied all the existing documentation on CGI. On the way back, Jim considered what he didn’t like about traditional CGI-based programming environments. From these initial musings the core of Zope was written while flying back from the CGI class.

Zope Corporation (then known as Digital Creations) went on to release three open-source software packages to support web publishing: Bobo, Document Template, and BoboPOS. These packages were written in a language called Python, and provided a web publishing facility, text templating, and an object database, respectively. Digital Creations developed a commercial application server based on these components and called it Principia. In November of 1998, investor Hadar Pedhazur convinced Digital Creations to open source Principia, thereby creating the foundation for the Zope application server.

In 2001, the Zope community began working on a component architecture for Zope, but after several years they ended up with something much more: Zope 3. WhileZope 2 was powerful and popular, Zope 3 was designed to bring web application development to the next level.

Source: The Zope3 Book

© 2012 Zope Foundation

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