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It's called marketing. RubyOnRails wasn't the first web framework and it certainly wasn't the best. In fact, it was pretty shitty. But it was the first that had a professionally designed website that advertised its benefits and a screencast that explained and demonstraded them. The pratically invented screencasts. Weeks later slashdot was filled with Rails fanatics.

The first version of the Zope Webapp Server came out roughly a decade before rails and still was notabliy superiour to any other WebFW, Rails included, in all aspects. Yet nobody cared. Why? That's why. Bland website? Nothing flashy? Can't find what I'm looking for? Backend UI without good looking buttons? Won't adhere to the loudmouths and hippsters and won't get attention, won't get critical mass, will lose eventually. It's that simple, even in the FOSS world nowadays (Rails actually sought to that, btw.)

If you really want to bring ICEwm (back) into the limelight, join the team, update their 12 year old website, bundle a new version with good looking modern themes and your tweaked setup, give it a new version number and do a little rattling on related online forums. Once everything is in place, tested, up and running that is. If you've done your job well, userbase will rise again and IceWM 2.0 will the the Hip WM of 2014. Fluxbox, a Blackbox fork, gained hippness status some years back the exact same way. Neat website, one or two nice little extras, screenshots, a well kempt miniblog and everybody went "Oh, look, new and shiny."

That's just about all there is to it. But don't you dare think good marketing isn't work and isn't worth giving as much thought as your projects software architecture. It's more work and - most of the time - even more important than that for the success of a project. Even in FOSS.

Good luck.

Python, Python is my favorite language, however it isn't that good for web.

Go home, comment. You're drunk.

Django, Pylons, Bottle, Flask, TurboGears, Zope, Web2Py...

And that's just some of the popular frameworks..

http://www.zope.org/ - both WLS and hibernate made obsolete decade ago
that "both" - unfortunetaly the case when too much is too much ;-)

Zope is an open source application server specializing in content management, intranets, and custom web applications. Zope is written in Python and has a large, global community of developers and companies. http://zope.org/

It is a ready to use server that even without any programming you can start-up your web project just by uploading your documents to it. And with programming you can can achieve same power as with Django - or even more if you check how many products (ready to use components and frameworks) you can find at http://www.zope.org/Products.

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on Python and the Zope application server. Plone is easy, flexible, and gives you a system for web content that is ideal for projects, communities, websites and intranets. http://plone.org/

Plone opens even more ways and power for you - it is a ready to use portal and it is a framework for writing portal applications. And again, check how many products it offers and compare it to Django: http://plone.org/products.

Zope is an open source application server specializing in content management, intranets, and custom web applications. Zope is written in Python and has a large, global community of developers and companies. http://zope.org/

It is a ready to use server that even without any programming you can start-up your web project just by uploading your documents to it. And with programming you can can achieve same power as with Django - or even more if you check how many products (ready to use components and frameworks) you can find at http://www.zope.org/Products.

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on Python and the Zope application server. Plone is easy, flexible, and gives you a system for web content that is ideal for projects, communities, websites and intranets. http://plone.org/

Plone opens even more ways and power for you - it is a ready to use portal and it is a framework for writing portal applications. And again, check how many products it offers and compare it to Django: http://plone.org/products.

For Zope and web development you should really look at Grok instead. Otherwise things are going to be painful with Zope.

So you're not personally familiar with python-based web development. There are a great many people out there that are though: Django, Pythons, Turbogears, Zope are all great places to start.

Are you referring to reloading Products which contain code changes?

Nope. We looked at Products, but they'd require more modification to our cross-application business logic layer than we really wanted to make. Basically, we didn't want to make the code a good fit for Zope specifically at the expense of making it a worse fit for everything else that used it. If Zope had been our only user of that code, sure.

To be honest, I wouldn't allow a process like Zope to render the reports by itself, I'd pass it off to a daemon running on the server.

It sounds like to me you've a serious design flaw in your application(s).

The code works like this:

• User submits a form to request a report.
• A Python script validates the request.
• A Z SQL Method runs a query with the given parameters.
• The results go to a Page Template for rendering.

Your solution:

• User submits a form to request a report.
• A Python script validates the request.
• The user is redirected to a temporary page.
• The parameters are sent to an external daemon.
• The user keeps auto-refreshing the page every few seconds to see if the report is done yet.
• Zope eventually finds the report.
• The results go to a Page Template for rendering.

Yes, I can see why you would think that my design - which is exactly how The Zope Book tells you to do it - is seriously flawed. :-)

Or maybe it's partially because Zope by default only supports four threads, and that to get more than 7, you have to "enter quite deep into the systems' bowels".

But I don't want to slag on Zope! It's a good app server, and was vital in getting our application to the point it's at today. It's just that we've outgrown it, and don't want to invest a huge amount of effort in making our installation yet more customized and complicated to hope we can get a few more years out of it. We're taking this chance to step back and re-evaluate some decisions and start on a slightly different path.

why not use some sort of application framework to run your processes where you use a web interface to check status and output? such as Zope or Grok

These are just some of my favorites.

Any framework could be good, but you could use supervisord to detach your process from the terminal.

why not use some sort of application framework to run your processes where you use a web interface to check status and output? such as Zope or Grok

These are just some of my favorites.

Any framework could be good, but you could use supervisord to detach your process from the terminal.

CakePHP Framework (supports PHP5 & PHP4), Version 1.2 Stable due any time soon.
Symfony. PHP 5 Meta Framework using Propel and other layer components. The accompaning book (free PDF, buyable dead-tree) is a very good documentation.
Prado. Event-Oriented PHP 5 Framework. Very interesting.
Code Igniter. Lightweight PHP Framework for smaller stuff. Neat website.

Django. Python Framework.
TurboGears. Python Meta Framework using some 3rd Party stuff like Templating layers and such.
Zope Web Application Server. To date unmatched. What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

You mean like the open source Zope (written in Python), invented over 10 years ago? Great, now I can tie my open source language to a closed-source object store.

I agree. I ran through the getting started pages and didn't see anything better than http://www.zope.org/ or http://www.djangoproject.com/ (competing python web application stacks).

So, the downside is learning a new application stack and the upside is free hosting for now. This sounds like it is targeting college students who can't afford the quite minimal ISP hosting costs currently available in the market. I can't see building a business around this for the same reason that SaaS has not predominated for mission critical systems.

They make a lot of "scalability for free" claims. If true, then that might make their offering more compelling. What's that old adage? Fantastic claims require fantastic proof. I look forward to seeing where this will go but am weary at "betting the farm" on it at this point in time.

I'm using PHP for my day-to-day work and deal a lot with Ruby fanboys, but I have to say that Python has a special place in my heart.
Here are the upsides (and some things that make Python exceptional) in my book:

1.) Very much like PHP and Perl, Python lacks the academic stench and has a general overall non-challance and n00by friendlyness to it. Things that *really* bug me about C and Java. And a smell that Ruby is gaining due to all the Java people brining their old bad habbits over to ruby.

2.) It's elegant and has a very neat and clean syntax, lacking the bizar and intimidating curly braces and semi-colons strewn all about in classics such as Java or JS. Or PHP for that matter.

3.) Indentation as block delimiter. The most ridiculed thing about Python (ridiculed by people who've never used Python) is acutally one of it's neatest features. Keeps code clean, minimal, human-readably and it's style in sync across many developers. Great for collaboration. And let's not forget that famous Donald Knuth quote: "We will perhaps eventually be writing only small modules which are identified by name as they are used to build larger ones, so that devices like indentation, rather than delimiters, might become feasible for expressing local structure in the source language." ... He said it best back in '74, nothing to add here.

4.) Python is used in serious non-trivial areas and applications in every field I can think of. Gaming, Multimedia/3D, Science, Large Scale HPC (Google f.i.), Embeded and, last but not least, sophisticated web applications. It apparently integrates very well as a scripting language, judging from the countless applications that use it as their choice of script and it also drives large non-trivial applications as core technology. (Googles Deployment Pipeline or, f.e. Blender)

5.) It's the foundation for the most sophisticated web kit to date: Zope. Zope is way ahead of anything in the Rails ballpark (or any other Web-FW), and it's only due to crappy project marketing on Zope's side that it didn't get as much attention in 2001 as Rails did since 2004. Until the MVC+SQL layering crowd catches up with Zope it will be another few years, until then it will remain the bar for any programmers who've ever come across it. (Like many PHP Framework & CMS developers I know)

6.) It's got a regular Webkit called 'Django' (drinking buddies of the Rails crew) which is quite popular and in itself makes me curious enough to want to pick up Python again.

Bottom line:
If you're looking to learn a new PL, give Python a try. And even if you despise that indentation thing I recommend you try coding in it for 20 minutes. You'll notice that it doesn't bother you at all, since programmers who are experienced enough to worry about that indent correctly all the time anyway.

The concept is called templating and used to be called 'Server Side Includes' (somewhere around 1997 or so ... ). ASP, JSP and PHP are originally SSI languages / templating languages.
And if you want to use templating for your web developement - which is discussion worthy in itself - anything other that TAL (Pe(rl)-TAL, PHP-TAL or 'original' TAL is completely pointless, because the above mentioned languages are nothing but templating solutions in themselves. There is no point bolting another layer of that on top of them. Which is why I strongly dislike Smarty and it's ilk.

Oh, and I highly doubt that ASP has anything as neat and usefull as TAL. Do check out the OSS solutions, they're regarded as technology leaders in the field for a reason, which is one reason ASP & Co. are treated with suspicion.

If you're looking for a powerful CMS to to "CMSy" things then Plone is great. If you want to customize Plone, then this is DEFINITELY the book. If you want to create a web application but aren't a rocket scientist, then it may make more sense to look at something like Grok. Grok is "web application development for cavement (tm)".

Plone is great if it is a good fit between the requirements and developing custom document types within a CMS framework. The architecture is highly layered. The low level way of developing under plone has a non-trivial learning curve to it. The high level way is to use what is known as plone archetypes which makes it really easy to create custom document types. The skinning of the custom types becomes very easy using Zope's METAL technology which is a very cool page templating system.

I have discussed plone previously here and here.

Acl_users? MailHost? Do they, do they, ... Yes! They use Zope!

Check out the admin panel. The error message is a zope.org message. Zope is licensed under their own OSS license. Now who's breaking copyright licenses? :)

I think the object database management system (ODBMS) will overtake RDBMSs in the future for several reasons (from the link and my own musings):

1. Object-oriented databases are designed to work well with object-oriented programming languages such as Python, Java, C#, Visual Basic .NET, C++ and Smalltalk. This makes implimentation quick and easy - yet stable and scalable at the same time.

2. ODBMSs use exactly the same model as object-oriented programming languages.

3. It is also worth noting that object databases hold the record for the World's largest database (over 1000 Terabytes at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center).

4. Access to data can be faster because joins are often not needed (as in a tabular implementation of a relational database). This is because an object can be retrieved directly without a search, by following pointers (e.g. the objects are stored in trees for fast retrieval). Dynamic indexing schemes further speeds up retrieval of full text searches.

5. Provides data persistence to applications that are not necessarily 'always on' - e.g. HTTP based stateless applications.

I think RDBMSs will be around for some time -- but they will be relegated to more structured situations and smaller data sets. ODBMSs will take over where data is changing, persistence is critical, data types are mostly large binary objects with associated meta-data, and datasets are humongous.

Right now my favorite ODBMS is the ZODB (Zope Object Data Base) - an ODBMS system tightly integrated with both Python (implimented using Python's native 'pickle' object persistence functionality), and the Zope web application development system - which itself is built with and uses Python. You can learn more about Zope at Zope.org.

If you're interested in Python Web development, you'll find a host of network and Web specific frameworks. I suggest checking out Twisted, Zope, Plone, and Django for examples. You may also find some other goodies when you explore the Python Cheese Shop.

Of course, no mention of Python can pass by without someone bringing up Ruby on Rails, so I'll just do that right now. :) However, I have no experience with it whatsoever, so I'll withhold any opinion.

"We would still be thankful for RMS though. "

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard!

Thank you, Richard! And happy birthday!

Zope. - What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

Also be sure to check out Plone, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, Prado and Turbogears before you blindly join the overhyped Rails bandwagon.

http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/SummerOfCode2007

If you want to code for Zope, go check it out.

BZ

I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.

• Try http://jakarta.apache.org/ for lots of Java libraries.
• I find http://www.springframework.org/ is a great framework extension for Java.
• I like spring better, but http://www.hibernate.org/ provides an ORM for both Java and .NET developers.
• If you are working in Perl, then http://www.cpan.org/ is the place for you.

When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.

• I believe that http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/ is great for project management.
• I have used http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ for years and know it to be a great mind mapping tool.
• I believe that http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ is a great diagramming tool.
• I'm a big fan of http://www.umlet.com/ and find it to be very useful for creating UML diagrams.
• I switched from sodipodi to http://www.inkscape.org/ which is fantastic for drawing vector images.
• I am also a big fan of http://www.gimp.org/ which is used to draw raster images.

I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.

Flood the database of the spammers with junk email, using tools like robocage.

From the product readme:
" RoboCage is a Zope product that produces random text out of a word dictionary. It mixes fake email addresses into that random text, as well as links back to itself (with different URLs, though). Thus, it provides a cage-like facilitly to "catch" email-harvesting robots."

http://www.zope.org/Members/philikon/RoboCage/fold er_contents

http://www.zope.org/

Zope, an Application server written with Python.

At least here at Brazil it has a good acceptance, and there are good oportunities for pyhton developers here.

He missed ZOPE, with such add-ons as the Plone content management system, becomes very competitive in the RIA space. Zope uses the object database ZODB. Zope is written mostly in Python - and uses python as its development language of choice (although you can use others).

Been using it for years -- it is stable as a rock, and Version 3 is looking very cool. If you love Python, then Zope is the development framework to use imho.

... inspired Jim Fulton to develop the core of Zope on a plane back from a CGI class ...

Quit the hype allready. There are at least 3 oss web packages out there that are better in more than just a few aspects:
django ( http://www.djangoproject.com/ )
Symfony ( http://www.symfony-project.com/ )
Zope ( http://www.zope.org/ )
Zope is by far the oldest and most sophisticated. Django is Rails done right and in Python and Symfony is a PHP metaframework that includes Propel and some other third party goodies with tons of very neat PHP 5 foundation work. Each one of these kick Rails up and down the street when it comes to ease of use, ease of deployment, available documentation and performance (Zope may be a little slower, but they have a full-blownobject relational DB built in that makes SQL look like peek and poking a c64 back in 1985).
And since the Ruby on Rails people use PHP to power their Rails website (oh, the irony; http://rubyonrails.org/index.php ) I'd trust in even PHP being able to perform more than good in the newest lineup of Frameworks.

So quit the rails-only hype allready, it's anoying.

The main difference being deploying a web based app world wide is simply a case of saying look here:
http://www.zope.org/ It comes down to economics.

The original poster was considering sharepoint but found it lacking. I would totally agree that plone might be just what the original poster is looking for. It is easy to integrate your own apps into this CMS by writing your own document types (called archetypes) and skinning them using TAL. Aggregate, navigation, or reporting pages can be easily cooked up with a little python script and skinned by TAL.

What you need is something like WebDB or Zope. As a programmer -- I hate it! It's to restrictive. However, as a lazy DBA who doesn't want to write simple custom 'applications' for everyone; it's great. Zope is free. I've used WebDB but not Zope. However, it seems similar. I have no idea how easy it is to administrate Zope. However, the key is that it allows end users to create simple dynamic web pages with a GUIish interface.

Another option is to find a cool wiki. Essentially this is another take on content management. You may find this model suits you needs better.

To plug a few projects where I have gotten a lot of help when my knowledge of the subject has been limited. By all means they could have given me a RTFM response but instead they answered my questions throughly and respectfully.

Zope http://www.zope.org/
OpenNMS http://www.opennms.org/index.php/Main_Page
MailScanner http://www.sng.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailscanner/
MailWatch http://mailwatch.sourceforge.net/doku.php
SipX http://sipx-wiki.calivia.com/index.php/Main_Page

Before Suse for Sparc died:
http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-sparc/
(Too bad that is gone, it was a nice Sparc based distro)

You know a thing is superhyped when v1.1 is mentioned on slashdot.
Mind you RoR is cool compared to j2EE. Then again, it's allmost as if C is cool when compared to J2EE. J2EE sucks big time for server side web - even the Java Gurus agree on that. End of discussion, no news here.
But RoR isn't the end all of ssi frameworks. Django is at least as good (I'd say better and cleaner than RoR) and Zope has been around since the ninties and still is years ahead of the rest. People with an overview over the technologies generally agree on that. I had a story submission (rejected) on that the other week. Check out the linked webcast, it's a very interessting analysis of a set of technologies and solutions:

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Nasa/JPL Web Framework Shootout

In an educative and entertaining webcast, Sean Kelly, a Nasa/JPL software engineer, goes into the details of a project based comparsion between a set of web application frameworks and servers. Including the much hyped Ruby on Rails and Django. Various Java technologies, Ruby on Rails, Django, TurboGears and Zope are covered. Details and traits of each are mentioned. For people involved with web developement there are not to many suprises though, yet the presentation and Kellys commenting are fun to watch.
In a nutshell: EJB, Hibernate and various other Java flavours fail spectacularly, Zope scores a clear victory with Django, RoR and TurboGears relatively close behind. Development speed, error-gotchas, the need for hand-tweaking and the requirement of handwritten SQL and available documentation go into the measuring. As does an overall tongue-in-check "fun-factor". The details are interessting though. TurboGears 'error-driven' developement gets a positive review, RoRs automated controller generation aswell and Zope gets a complete rundown on it's astounding set of features. In the end long-time Java developer Kelly convinces us that - no matter what we do - we really, positively, don't want to use EJB or Hibernate for this kind of stuff. Very entertaining and informative indeed.
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Yup, the wole "problem" has become to look so silly that some zope3 leading developers are planning

CPS 3.4 is a Zope 2.9 app

It is not a Zope 3 app and although it leverages Zope 3 components certainly it is not based on zope 3 Component Architecture

No, they aren't running Slash, they are running Squishdot, which is a Slash clone built on top of Zope.

Now combine that with coding/testing Zope 3 from a command line... and you've got some serious grue.

No, there have historically been very few security holes with CPS, Plone, Silva, or any of the other Zope-based CMSs out there. In fact, there have been very few security holes with Zope.

All that being said, there are a few sites that have built their own CMS on top of Zope (it has a decent CMF built into it, so it's far from impossible to roll one's own). The two biggest profile ones are probably Boston.com and Saugus.net, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.

1. A apache 1.x or 2.x compatible .so/.dll module.
2. A ISAPI module for IIS.
3. A CGI application.

That might be true, if Vonage was doomed to offer exactly the same service they do today, for the entire life of the company.

Fortunately, Vonage also has a bunch of employees, and (hopefully) are working on other projects.

Joel Spolsky says "the goal is not to solve some specific problem, but to be able to convert money to code through programmers". Paul Graham says "What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people." One of the Zope people described the decision to open-source Zope by saying "This is not the last innovation we'll make".

If you're judging a company by its initial product, you're not judging the company, you're judging the product. Look at the first products of many of today's companies. Few are in business with their first product, or even an updated version of it. (Would you have invested in Ole Kirk's wooden toys?)

If VOIP does take off, there's plenty more than just those two services that they can provide. As a really simple example, suppose you're president of BigCo, and decide that switching to a VOIP phone on 120,000 desks will save you money. Where are you going to find a decent-sized group of engineers with VOIP expertise to pull it off? I can think of a place...

But that's simply a direct application of their skills. Google took a great search engine, and built webmail, a chat system, and great 3d mapping tool. Who'd have guessed?

If you knew their people, you might have. All it takes is people. Their existing technology is just a red herring.

> At first I looked at the topic and was sure it's a typo

Please, the correct spelling is typo3, not just typo.

Not to be confused with the already opensource Zopeweb application server.

How do you mod something informative but off-topic?

At first I looked at the topic and was sure it's a typo

I'm always wondering why Python is left out from this kind of conversations.
Python is the best language I've ever worked with. It's very human friendly, no need to learn/read/write hieroglyphs, like in Ruby or Perl. Very compact, no need to write a pages of text to print Hello World, like in Java. It's very oo, supports multiple inheritance, what makes code reuse a reality. Has a wide range of modules, a wonderful application server, called Zope, a code generator, that eats UML and many many features, to make it an outstanding choice.

There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch.

Personally I'm a fan of the Zope / CMF series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).

There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com and Saugus.net. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya). Most though are free and open source, like Plone, Infrae Silva, and Nuxeo CPS. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.

The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.

There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch.

Personally I'm a fan of the Zope / CMF series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).

There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com and Saugus.net. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya). Most though are free and open source, like Plone, Infrae Silva, and Nuxeo CPS. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.

The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.

Z Object Publishing Environment (ZOPE) http://www.zope.org/ and its derivative Plone http://www.plone.org/ seem like they have all this and more. Like they are a whole universe. What does Tapestry have that Zope/Plone doesn't? -- IV

How about Zope? Wouldn't that at least somewhat quality as a web application container for Python? (even if it is more application-specific than something like Tomcat)