 |
Joe VanAndel of the National Center for Atmospheric research has
a knack for living on the bleeding edge of technology and bringing
us pearls of wisdom that will turn out much later to be central to the
way we work today. Indeed, it was back in the Pleistocene era
that Joe first introduced us to URLs and the new Mosaic application,
predicting that we would one day evolve into land-dwelling creatures
who would surf the Web.
Joe's April 1999 FRUUG presentation promises to be just as pivotal.
He presented the
Z Object Publishing Environment (ZOPE - http://www.zope.org), an open source web application platform
written mostly in Python (with some extensions written in C for speed).
It competes with products like Cold Fusion, Silverstream, and Netscape
Application Server. Zope has an integrated object database and can also
access several relational databases. ZOPE's object publishing system
converts a URL to a method call of a ZOPE object, which provides a very
powerful and flexible application architecture. The object database
supports "sessions" that allow new content to be developed on the "live"
server without being publically visible until it is "released". The
object
database also supports a powerful "undo" facility which can backout any
change, restoring a previous version of the web site. Zope is managed
"thru-the-web", without requiring telnet or rlogin access to the server.
ZOPE offers customizable security, giving password controlled access to
various portions of your ZOPE web site.
Joe successfully demonstrated some applications built with ZOPE,
including a FAQ application and a query interface to a MySQL
(http://www.tcx.se) database.
Joe has made his viewgraphs available
to us.
|
 |
