What is "zope"

Zope \Zope\, n. [G.] (Zo["o]l.) A European fresh-water bream ( Abramis ballerus).

n. A fish of species (taxlink Abramis ballerus species noshow=1), native to Eurasia.

Zope is a community project concerned with a free and open-source, object-oriented web application server written in the Python programming language. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodology for the Web. Zope has been recognized as a Python killer app, an application that helped put Python in the spotlight.

Over the last few years, the Zope community has spawned several additional web frameworks with disparate aims and principles, but sharing philosophy, people, and source code. Zope 2 is still the most widespread of these frameworks, largely thanks to the Plone content management system, which runs on Zope 2. BlueBream (earlier called Zope 3) is less widespread but underlies several large sites, including Launchpad. Grok was started as a more programmer-friendly framework, "Zope 3 for cavemen", and in 2009 Pyramid (ex BFG) gained popularity in the Zope community as a minimalistic framework based on Zope principles.