To study about the Zope as a open source web application server.

Aim – To study about the Zope as a open source web application server.

Theory – Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the python programming language. It features a transactional object database which can store not only content and custom data but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, and relational database (RDBMS) connections and code. It features a strong through-the-web development model. Built around the concept of “safe delegation of control”, Zope’s security architecture also allows you to turn control over parts of a web site to other organizations or individuals. The transactional model applies not only to Zope’s object database, but to many relational database connectors as well, allowing for strong data integrity. This transaction model happens automatically, ensuring that all data is successfully stored in connected data sources by the time a response is returned to a web browser or other client.

Unlike common file-based Web templating systems such as ASP or PHP, Zope is a highly object-oriented Web development platform that covers much more of the problem domain for Web application developers. It provides clean separation of data, logic and presentation, an extensible set of built-in objects and a powerful integrated security model. The Zope infrastructure relieves the developer of most of the onerous details of Web application development such as data persistence, data integrity and access control, allowing you to focus on the problem at hand.

Zope users include Viacom, Boston.com, SGI, AARP, Bell Atlantic Mobile, Red Hat, NASA, The US navy, Digital Garage and Storm Linux.

                            Zope provides all of the necessary tools to integrate data and content from nearly any source into powerful, coherent and maintainable Web applications:

   

·                     Through-the-Web management

   

·                     Integrated access control

   

·                     Content management

   

·                     Enterprise data access

   

·                     Built-in search tools

   

·                     Powerful data sharing

    

·                     Safe delegation

1.  The Web Application Platform

2.  XML Support

3.  Data Access

4.  Data Sharing

5.  Integrated searching

                                 A new version of Zope, Zope 3, has been in development for some years. Zope 2 has proven itself as a useful framework for web applications development, but its use revealed some shortcomings. To name a few, creating Zope 2 products involves copying a lot of boilerplate code – “magic” code – that just has to be there, and the built-in management interface is difficult to modify or replace. Zope 3 is a rewrite of the software that attempts to address these shortcomings while retaining the advantages of Zope that led to its popularity. Zope 3 is based on a component architecture that makes it easy to mix software components of various origins written in Python. The first production release of the new software, Zope X3 3.0.0, was released on November 6, 2004. The current production release, Zope 3.3.0, was released on September 27, 2006. We can download it from internet.

                   So we have studied about the Zope, its features, its application and how it is useful to help us in computer field and how to get it.