Introduction
Zope is a next-generation Open Source application server and portal toolkit developed by Zope Corporation and a large active community of users. It runs on nearly all UNIX platforms as well as Windows NT and can be used with most popular web servers or its own built in web server. Zope is written (and extensible with) Python, a powerful object-oriented programming language, with performance sensitive components written in C.
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 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
One of the things that sets Zope apart from other application servers is that it was designed from the start to be tightly coupled not only with the Web object model, but also the Web development model. Today's successful Web applications require the participation of many people across an organization who have different areas of expertise. Zope is specifically designed to accommodate this model, allowing site managers to safely delegate control to design experts, database experts and content managers.
Zope Architecture
Zope's flexible component architecture allows it to provide solutions to many different problems. Zope is composed of components which work together to provide a complete web architecture.
Zope Components
ZServer
ZServer provides flexible internet connectivity supporting many network protocols including HTTP, FTP, XML-RPC, FastCGI, and PCGI. ZServer can operate in tandem with existing web servers.
Object Database (ZODB)
Zope's object database, ZODB, supports transactions, undo, private versions, and scales to gigabytes of data. There is also an optional enterprise option available which provides scalability and failover.
RDBMS integration
Zope offers easy to use and powerful connection to industry leading databases including: Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as well as ODBC drivers.
Zope Products
Zope Products extend the Zope core by adding new object types and custom facilities written in Python.
ZClasses
ZClasses extend the Zope core with new object types, which are created through the web. ZClasses do not require any programming and can be easily distributed and installed.
These are Advantages and the architecture of Zope Web Application Server.