Steven Murdoch wrote: > This is a post from another mailing list I'm on, concerning Zope. I know > nothing about it, but in the distant past I seem to remember someone in > SLUG talking about it. I anyone is able to give a simple explanation of > Zope and is willing to send it into the SLUG list I'd be happy to pass > it on. > > Steven.
Zope is, at it's heart, an Object Database (ODB). Object Databases start with a "root" object, which child objects are attached to, and child objects can then be associated with these children, and so on, thus giving you a tree structure. On top of this ODB, is layered Medusa <http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/index.html>, which is "A high-performance, extensible Internet server framework.". There's a little glue, to connect HTTP requests (and FTP) into method calls on the objects stored in the database. Thus, if you have objects: Root: \-Folder-HTML_Document Where "Folder" and "HTML Document" are objects of their respective types, and you request HTTP /Folder/HTML_Document, then a method will be called on the HTML_Document object, in Zope, you can define the "default" method that should be called, which in HTML_Documents is the "index_html" method, cleverly, when HTML_Document objects have their "index_html" method called, they render themselves in HTML. This sounds complex, maybe, but, it's the basics of Zope, and most people don't really see the OO-Nature of the system. Otherwise, it's just a Web-Server, with a non-filesystem oriented storage system, and a nice web-based interface (in which case, you might as well investigate Roxen...) Oh, and you can embed scripts in Python and Perl :) Kevin -------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.lug.org.uk http://www.linuxportal.co.uk http://www.linuxjob.co.uk http://www.linuxshop.co.uk --------------------------------------------------------------------
