Zope — a Swiss Army Knife for the Web?
| Published date | 01 February 2000 |
| Pages | 61-71 |
| Date | 01 February 2000 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040753 |
| Author | Paul Browning |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
Zope - a Swiss Army
Knife for the Web?
by Paul Browning, Information Strategy
Co-ordinator, University of Bristol
Zope
is
an open source Web application
platform
for
both
NT and
Unix which
will
intemperate with Web servers such
as
Apache
and
IIS.
It
supports
ftp,
http
put
and
WebDAV
publishing
methods.
It
has
a
highly
developed security model which allows
the
management
of
content to
be
extensively
devolved.
Zope integrates well with relational
databases
and
other services (including LDAP
and IMAP).
Motivation
I would be surprised if most people don't feel a
sense of achievement when they author their first
Web page. It's the first thing you ever made which
potentially the rest of the world can see. Others
learn about your new skill and before you know it
you've become the departmental webperson and
are buried in an avalanche of other people's
content to "put on the Web".
The chore of document conversion and the burden
of information maintenance quickly dispel the
euphoria of your first experience of authoring for
the Web. You are in an "ongoing Forth Road
Bridge painting-type situation" - having worked
through the information tree for which you are
allegedly responsible, a year has passed, and much
of the information needs updating again.
This state of affairs may still describe the Web
editions of many university prospectuses. It cer-
tainly described that at Bristol. Revised content
would arrive from academic departments as e-
mails,
faxes, bits of paper, annotated versions of
the previous year's entry. This would be re-typed
into a monolithic Word document by the Admis-
sions Office which would be in turn passed to the
Information Office to be prepared in a desk-top
publishing package to be sent for printing. Only
after the printed version of the prospectus had been
produced (involving a further iteration of checking
with academic departments) was the monolithic
Word document then reverse-engineered into a set
of several hundred manually authored Web pages.
Needless to say this all took a long time and was
error prone.
Now, thanks to a Web-enabled database, the
process as been reversed. The pages of the Web
prospectus are created dynamically "on the fly"
and reflect the current content of the back-end
database. The database is edited via Web forms.
When an edition of the paper prospectus is re-
quired the entire content of the database is simply
dumped to a monolithic "snapshot" file and this is
used as the raw material for the paper publishing
process. The secret, of
course,
has been to separate
the information content from the design - the
exception rather than the rule for manually created
Web pages.
FileMakerPro was the Web-enabled database
software employed. Although originally low cost
and easy to Web-enable (you don't need any other
server software or middleware), under Windows
NT it has proved less than robust (various ruses
have had to be employed to run it as an NT service
and to stop this service hanging every few days).
Somewhat late in the day we have now started to
Web-enable our corporate Oracle databases and it
now makes sense to look for an alternative
middleware solution which will integrate well with
this technology (or at least SQL databases) and
which might be supported by our service depart-
ments generally. There is also a need to identify a
technology (or mixture of technologies) that allow
us to automate (or at least devolve extensively) the
management of relatively unstructured informa-
tion (conventional databases tend not to be good at
this).
Zope - what is it?
Zope (which stands for Z Object Publishing
Environment) is an open source Web application
platform from Digital Creations. Zope is freely
available1 for both NT and Unix and will
interoperate with Web servers such as Apache and
IIS.
It competes with middleware products such as
Cold Fusion, Netscape Application Server, PHP,
mod_perl, Frontier and Vignette. Zope is written in
Python2.
VINE
119
—
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