“There have been many developments on the market for web
application platforms. Most of the large software companies have
some product that qualifies as (or that they want to qualify as) an
application platform for the web. Many of these are quite costly
and the information in it is hard to maintain. Moreover, being
proprietary products, they are also closed and hard to extend with
non-proprietary additions. In the open software realm there are a
few alternatives, mostly geared towards Linux.”
“Zope is the name of the open software product under
consideration. I shall not go into comparisons with its
competitors. In the one and a half years from its inception around
October 1998, Zope has become popular at least in the Open Source
community. It claims to be the leading Open Source web application
platform.”
“Zope is a product of Digital Creations, based in
Fredericksburg, Virginia (DC for short). It is a marriage of
Principia, a commercial Web-content management system and Bobo, a
Python Web programming environment. DC was persuaded to go
into the public realm by the venture capitalist investing in the
company. It’s business became based on (Zope-based) Web consulting.
Judging by the rate DC hires new developers, this has been a
profitable decision.”