Original author(s) | Zope Corporation |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Zope Corporation |
Initial release | July 1999 |
Stable release | 5.8.6[1]
/ 4 October 2023 |
Available in | Python |
Type | web framework |
License | Zope Public License |
Website | zope |
Zope is a family of free and open-source web application servers written in Python, and their associated online community. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodology for the Web.[2][3] Zope has been called a Python killer app, an application that helped put Python in the spotlight.[4][5]
Over the last few years, the Zope community has spawned several additional web frameworks with disparate aims and principles, but sharing philosophy, people, and source code. Zope 2 is still the most widespread of these frameworks, largely thanks to the Plone content management system, which runs on Zope 2. BlueBream (earlier called Zope 3) is less widespread but underlies several large sites, including Launchpad. Grok was started as a more programmer-friendly framework, "Zope 3 for cavemen", and in 2009 Pyramid gained popularity in the Zope community as a minimalistic framework based on Zope principles.
Zope also pioneered the idea of object publishing, in which a URL describes the method that should be called on a particular object.
In 1997, Jim Fulton (the CTO at Zope Corp) developed a technique he called "Object Publishing", and implemented in a library called the Python Object Publisher (aka Bobo). The object publishing metaphor is found in many Python toolkits today; in other languages it's found only in crippled form, at best.
The use of Zope has spread so quickly that many Pythonistas have looked to it as a Python Killer Application - a system so good that it naturally pushes Python into the development spotlight.