EIONET Training Beginners Zope Course Miruna Bădescu Finsiel Romania Copenhagen, 27 October 2003

Overview n Zope is an open source Web application server n The Zope acronym stands for Z object publishing environment n Published by Zope Corporation (formerly Digital Creations) n Most of it coded in Python, critical performance parts written in C n Contains all components to build secure, speedy and reliable Web-based applications

Supported platforms n Officially supported on (binary distributions): F Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP F Linux/Unix F Solaris n Runs successfully on (source distributions): F NetBSD/OpenBSD/FreeBSD F HP-UX F MacOS X F BeOS

Features (1) n Fast development/deployment time n Easy to remotely administrate and maintain using a Web browser Intuitive Zope Management Interface (ZMI) with the looks of a file system browser Conceived to allow team work Delegation of authority Versioning Large, active and growing community of users and developers extendibility: developers are encouraged to build stand-alone packed components ready for reuse huge collection of open source Python modules and libraries and is oriented to rapid development

Features (2) n Zope translates the WEB into object structures and stores them into its own object oriented DB F easy to backup, fault resistant F support for indexing and searching F undo support n Built-in WEB server (Medusa) – easy to replace with another front-end WEB server (Apache, IIS etc) F has an FTP component allowing access to the database using a folder-like model n Scalability – distributing the hits on various machines that handle the workload using built-in component ZEO (Zope Enterprise Options)

Features (3) n Database integration (Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Access, LDAP, IMAP) n Multiple protocol support (HTTP, FTP, WebDAV, SQL, ODBC) and standards (XML, DOM, XML/RPC, SOAP) n Built in extensible and granular security model n Single access point to server configuration, application management, (some of the) development and content n Accessible with almost any WEB browser

Object Orientation n To be able to use the best out of Zope basic concepts of Object Orientation should be learned n Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is a software development model used in many languages such us C++, Java, Python … n In an OO environment (such as Zope) the applications are modeled into objects n The objects are containers of data and control logic

Application NON object oriented In a non-OO application there are two distinct parts: n Code – is the business logic. In a WEB application it can be a CGI executed Perl script n Data – is the information on which the code is working. It can be stored in a DB such as Oracle or Mysql or just in plain files. Using this model the data is stored in a format known to the code and it will generally lose significance without it.

Zope Management Interface

Zope links n Official Zope Website n Support: Zope mailing lists n Zope exits n Python

Users and security The four key components of Zope security: n users – people (groups of people) n roles – kinds of responsibility (ie. Manager, Author, etc.); provide linkage between authentication and authorization n permissions – are specific to objects. Similar to permissions from the file systems (read, write, execute) n acquisition – a mechanism for sharing information among objects contained in a folder and in subfolders

Installation of Zope on Windows NT