ZOPE 2 Concepts

TTW: through the web

One of the most notable differences between the original Zope2 approach and todays best-practices is in the way you develop applications with Zope2. The original Zope2 approach has focussed on a Through-The-Web (TTW) development model. You would create your entire application and manage your data through the same browser interface and store everything transparently in the same database. This model has worked very well in the beginning of “the web” as many dynamic websites have been rather simple and specialized projects.

Over the years websites have grown their requirements and often turned into development projects of a considerable size. Today websites are understood as applications in themselves and need an approach which is no longer compatible with the TTW approach of the early Zope2.

 

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ZMI: a frame work to manage the objects in Zope.  This chapter explains how to use Zope’s web-based management interface. By the end of this chapter, you will be able to navigate around the Zope object space, copy and move objects, and use other basic Zope features.

 

 

Basic zope objects: basic objects to contain the data:

This chapter introduces objects, which are the most important elements of Zope. You’ll learn the basic Zope objects: content objects, presentation objects, and logic objects, and you’ll build a simple application using these objects.

 

Acquisition:This chapter introduces Acquisition, which is Zope’s mechanism for sharing site behavior and content

 

ZPT:

This chapter introduces Zope Page Templates, another Zope tool used to create dynamic web pages. You will learn about basic template statements that let you insert dynamic content, and how to create and edit page templates.

 

Security:

This chapter looks at how Zope handles users, authentication, authorization, and other security-related matters.

 

Seaching engineering:

This chapter shows you how to index and search objects with Zope’s built-in search engine: the Catalog. You’ll learn about indexing concepts, different patterns for indexing and searching, metadata, and search results.

 

Services: VHS

This chapter explains how to set up Zope in a “virtual hosting” environment, in which Zope sub-folders can be served as “top-level” host names. It includes examples that allow virtual hosting to be performed either “natively” or using Apache’s ‘mod_rewrite’ facility.

 

Services: session

This chapter describes Zope’s “sessioning” services, which allow Zope developers to “keep state” between HTTP requests.

 

ZEO: Zope Enterprise Option (ZEO), the solution of building and maintaining large web applications, and focuses on issues of management and scalability.

 

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Summary: ZOPE = ZMI + basic objects (content objects, presentation objects, and logic objects) + Acquisition mechanism for objects accessing and sharing + ZPT for extending + security + ZEO for scalability + services of searching, hosting and sessions for BS applications. 

 

Zope2 itself is a web framework that allows developers of varying skill levels to build web applications.

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