Python Web Frameworks Overview: Zope

Home People Zope Emulation
Web Frameworks
Python

URL

http://www.zope.org

Licence

ZPL - Zope is open source, as are many of the extensions and add-ons available for it.

Deployment Platforms

Operating Systems

Zope works on UNIX and Windows platforms.

Suitability

The "out of the box" single server option makes Zope attractive for developers who either do not want to integrate many components or have little experience in doing so. The need to have Zope processes continuously running excludes Zope from certain hosting environments, but being available as a packaged product with explicit security features, Zope is also attractive to other, potentially more specialised hosting companies. Thus, Zope hosting can be had, even for free, with certain hosting providers.

Development Interfaces

Environment Access

Session, Identification and Authentication

Persistence Support

Presentation Support

Other presentation systems could presumably be supported in Zope, but from Zope 2.5, the above technologies appear to be "first class".

Comments

Zope provides so much support for some activities that certain kinds of applications can be created and configured in very short periods of time, given enough experience of Zope development. Where object persistence is required, for example, Zope applications require little effort to make such mechanisms work, whereas other frameworks (such as Enterprise JavaBeans container-managed persistence) require a certain amount of administrative overhead (the declaration of each object schema) and may be prone to obscure failure, given the complexity of the integration and configuration of many different systems.

The means of configuring or customising applications in Zope seems very clever - by storing documents or objects at particular points in the object database, Zope's "acquisition" mechanism permits applications to find resources according to where both applications and resources reside, relative to one another. Moreover, by supporting such dynamic environmental lookup, Zope encourages the redistribution of applications by reducing the restrictions on how such applications need to be set up.