What Does Zope Mean?
Z Object Publishing Environment (Zope) is an open source Web Server built using Python. It encompasses a transactional database that stores content, HTML templates, scripts and features a search engine along with a RDBMS.
Zope simplifies the creation of dynamic Web apps and offers application-based support such as membership, news and search. Zope is built completely using open standards such as XML-RPC, DOM and WebDAV.
Techopedia Explains Zope
The Zope Object Database provides an object-oriented view of the website based on Zope. Each and every page and folder in the website is represented as an object under this view. Features such as encapsulation, polymorphism can be incorporated using such a view. Each page having a particular URL is mapped to a corresponding object in the Zope Object Database.
Zope supports HTML templates using Dynamic Template Mark-up Language (DTML) and Zope Page Templates (ZPT). DTML allows users to define tags that implement scripting in template pages. The users can define variables, Boolean conditions, and loops using DTML scripts. One problem associated with DTML is the addition of non HTML code to HTML documents and mixing of content and logic in HTML pages due to incorporation of DTML scripts.
ZP Templates use XML or HTML documents where all mark-up content is defined in the Template Attribute Language (TAL) namespace. The logic section can be written in Python thus simplifying coding approaches. Since XML follows DOM model, GUI based editors can be used to edit ZPT templates.
