level III what exactly is Zope ?

The question of what exactly is Zope caused me to have severe  headaches that disappeared only when I became enlightened and I understood what could be achieved with it.

Zope is mostly written in Python. Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java.

Zope consists of several different components that work together to help you build web applications. Zope comes with:

• A Web server: Zope comes with a built in web server that serves content to you and your users. Of course, you may already have an existing web server, such as Apache. Not to worry, Zope works with these web servers also, and any other web server that supports the Common Gateway Interface (CGI).
• A Web based interface. When you build web applications with Zope, you use your web browser to interact with the Zope management interface. This interface is a development environment that lets you do things like create web pages, add images and documents, connect to external relational databases and write scripts in different languages. Zope's management interface provides a simple, familiar way to manage objects that resembles the way many common file managers work.
• An object database. When you work with Zope, you are mostly working with objects that are stored in Zope's object database
• Relational integration with other databases. You don't have to store your information in Zope's object database if you don't want to, because Zope works with other relational databases such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, Sybase, MySQL and many others.
• Scripting language supports. Zope allows you to write web applications in a number of different languages, like Python, Perl, and Zope's own Document Template Markup Language (DTML).

Perhaps Zope's best feature of all is its friendly, open source license. This means that not only is Zope free of cost to download, but you are also free to use Zope in your own applications without paying royalties or usage fees. Zope's open source license also means that all of the "source code" for Zope is available for you to look at.

Zope History

In 1996 Jim Fulton, the CTO of Zope Corporation and Python guru wrote the core of Zope. Zope is still mostly written in Python with a few performance-critical sections in C. In November of 1998, investor Hadar Pedhazur convinced Zope Corporation to open source Principia. This became Zope.