“I’ve been looking into Web application development tools
lately. I finally got a chance to spend some time learning how to
use an extensible object-oriented Web application server called
Zope. Not much time, mind you; I’ve got a long way to go
before I can create even a simple application in Zope. But from
what I can see, Zope is pretty intriguing, and I urge you to take a
look at it yourself. You can find a link to Zope’s homepage (which
has everything you’ll need to start) and to a working site based on
Zope in the Resources section below.”
“It took a minimum of effort to install Zope, along with an
extra plugin or two to allow my Web applications to access a MySQL
database. Once I had everything set up, I started the built-in Zope
Web server, called Zserver. Zope can run in conjunction with an
existing Web server like Apache, but the easiest way to get started
is to use the Python-based Zserver….”
“If you’re unfamiliar with Python, I should warn you that it has
certain quirks that can be rather obtuse. For example, the flow of
code in a Python program is in part determined by text indentation.
This means that if you neglect to press the tab key just the right
number of times while coding, your program will not execute
properly, if at all. This approach may sound bizarre if you’re a C
programmer, but once you get used to it, it turns out to be quite a
nice feature of the language. It forces you to create visually
explicit code that remains quite readable long after you forget
what it was you were doing.”