An Open Source web application server for python - Zope

These days, project cost is the major factor taken care by all organizations on highest priority. And if you get a framework free of cost to build a web application, then this is certainly an advantage. So, if you are looking for a framework to build web application and you don’t want your cost to shoot up, then Zope is the best option.

Just because it is open source and is free of cost, it doesn’t mean it is far less in any of features to build web application as compare to other frameworks.

Zope stands for “Z Object Publishing Environment”. It is completely written in Python programming language and is an open source web application server to build web applications. Unlike common file-based Web templating systems such as ASP or PHP, Zope is a highly “object-oriented” Web development platform. Zope provides all features to build a web application like content management, session management, scaling and security.

Following are some of the features that Zope provides:

• Zope ships with objects that help you perform different tasks. Basic Zope objects take on one of three types of roles: 1. Content Objects like Folders, Files and Images. 2. Presentation Objects like DTML (Document Template markup language) and ZPT (Zope Page Templates) 3. Logic Objects like DTML (Document Template markup language), Python.

• Zope has its management interface called ZMI(Zope Management Interface). It is used to manipulate Zope objects. It also provides facility ‘Through the web management’. All management and application development can be done completely through the Web using only a browser.

• Zope itself is an inclusive platform. It doesn’t need any third party tool to support Zope (like relational database) to develop your application. Zope has its own database called ZODB(Zope Object Database). So you can use its own object database or can use any other relational databases with it.

• Applications created in Zope can scale almost linearly using Zope’s Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO) clustering solution. ZEO provides facility to use a web application across many computers.

• Zope has Session Management System. It provides methods able to track site visitor activity. Zope’s session management makes use of name-spaces like cookies, HTTP form elements, and/or parts of URLs “in the background” to keep track of user sessions.

• Zope provides Security and Safe Delegation so that users can have access to Zope objects for which the admin has set rights to.

• Zope provides Content Management Framework(CMF) that is a series of free software tools for Zope that forms a framework providing many of the key services a content management system would need.

This is a brief description about Zope and its features. You can explore more about Zope and its features.