Zope 3 has unicode everywhere

In july 2007, the Django project started to support unicode. I’m
happy to say that the Zope 3 project has supported unicode throughout
since 2002. Consistently. Without backwards compatibility
cruft. When the Django project gains this support, I, who doesn’t
really follow Django developments, learned about it from various
blogs. We in the Zope community don’t tell anyone as that’d spoil
the surprise. Or something.

Zope 3 has a built-in form generation and validation system

Last year, I heard a lot about ToscaWidgets. This year I hear a lot
about Django newforms, replacing Django’s older form generation
system.

Development of Zope 3’s declarative schema system and form generation
system started, guess when, in 2002, based on ideas we had been
exploring for a few years by then in the Zope 2 context. We’ve had 5
years of experience with it since then. This led to the evolution of a
new form generation system (on top of the existing, solid, declarative
schema system) in 2004. This year we’ve seen a further evolution of
this system with z3c.form (a fourth new forms iteration evolving
the work that had gone before).

So, Zope has a headstart of years of experience. We keep this hidden
within our own community, because otherwise it’d be like, telling!

An object database

CouchDb is gaining some attention recently. While not an object
database, it promises to store documents, not relational database
tables. Recently we’ve also witnessed some ORM Wars in various
Python blogs.

Meanwhile, wome people in the Rails world have been thinking…
Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of all this impedance mismatch between
objects and relational databases we could use a true object database?
Wouldn’t that be cool?

It’s time for me to yawn and say “been there, done that”. People might
somehow have missed it, but Zope 3 is equipped with an ACID-compliant,
clusterable object database, the ZODB, that has been under development
since 1997. The Zope people know the benefits of
document-oriented, object databases for web applications. We’ve worked
in this impedance-mismatch-free world for so long that we know the
drawbacks too, and thus have built Zope 3 extensions to work with
SQLAlchemy as well.

Buildout

We have been putting together complicated web applications from many
different bits and pieces for a while now in the Zope world. Setting
up a development environment or rolling out a deployment is quite an
involved job often involving endless INSTALL.txt files. Setuptools
and eggs offer a lot of help here, and the Zope project has been
embracing them in a major way. They still leave a lot of stuff to do
by hand however, especially if non-library components are involved
such as web servers.

Enter zc.buildout. zc.buildout is an extensible Python system for
assembling Python applications from multiple parts. It will work for
any Python project: I’ve used it with TurboGears, and to set up a game
development environment, among others. Zope itself is of course a
major user of it, and it was forged in the fires of long experience
and requirements of the Zope community. It’s a lot to chew on to
learn, but I believe any significant Python development project can
benefit from using it. I believe buildout is another example of where
the Zope project is tackling problems years ahead of many others
within the Python community. And now we’ve told you about it.

To conclude

These features shouldn’t be a secret. We should shout it off the
rooftops: the Zope community in many ways is still pushing the
frontiers of Python web framework development.

Zope 3 has powerful features, and now also has an easy entry point. If
you want an easy way to learn about the future of web development in
the Python world, please try it out in the form of Grok, which
promises to make Zope 3 safe for the cave man or woman in all of us.