“Last month we took an initial look at the open-source
Zope application server. In particular, we saw how you can use
Zope’s DTML (dynamic template markup language) tags to create
simple dynamic sites, as well as how you can manage a web site
using nothing more than a web browser.But anyone who has worked with DTML knows that it ceases to be
wonderful when you want to create something relatively complex.
DTML is best when it is used sparingly or when its functionality is
obvious; writing pages of DTML that contain a half-dozen nested
conditional () tags quickly becomes unreadable and difficult to
maintain, not to mention very nonmodular.This month, we look at Zope products, which form the core of
Zope’s flexibility. After installing and working with some existing
products, we will write our own simple product in Python.”