[lug] BLUG Meeting December 9, 1999

[Wayde Allen]

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                   Boulder Linux User's Group Meeting
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Where:   Room 1107, NIST Radio Building, 325 Broadway, Boulder
         (If you want to arrive early, join us at the Dark Horse for a
          bite to eat around 5:30 P.M.)

Time:    7:00 p.m.

Date:  December 9, 1999    

Presentation:  An introduction to ZOPE 

Speaker:  Joe VanAndel 

   Joe VanAndel has been working as a software engineer for the past 20
   years.  After graduating from UC Berkeley, he worked at AT&T Bell Labs
   on Oryx/Pecos, a real-time operating system. Following that, he had his
   "Boulder Startup Company" experience at Cadnetix Corporation, doing
   operating system development and developing design automation tools for
   the electronics industry.  For the past 10 years, Joe has worked at the
   National Center for Atmospheric Research.  He has worked on data
   acquisition and control systems for weather radars and on data quality
   improvements for the National Weather Service "NEXRAD" radars. 

   Joe has been involved in the WWW for a number of years.  Starting in  
   1993, he helped setup the Atmospheric Technology Division Web server at
   NCAR.  In 1994, he helped Centennial Middle School publish the world's
   first middle school student newspaper on the Web.

   For the last few years, he's been using the Python language for data 
   analysis, database interfaces, and web applications.
 

Abstract:

   The Z Object Publishing Environment (ZOPE - http://www.zope.org) is an
   open source web application platform written mostly in Python (with
   some extensions written in C for speed).   It competes with products
   like Cold Fusion, Silverstream, and Netscape Application Server.  Zope
   has an integrated object database and can also access several
   relational databases.  ZOPE's object publishing system converts a URL
   to a method call of a ZOPE object, which provides a very powerful and
   flexible application architecture.  The object database supports
   "sessions" that allow new content to be developed on the "live" server
   without being publicly visible until it is "released".  The object
   database also supports a powerful "undo" facility which can back out any
   change, restoring a previous version of the web site.  Zope is managed
   "thru-the-web", without requiring telnet or rlogin access to the
   server.  ZOPE offers customizable security, giving password controlled
   access to various portions of your ZOPE web site.

   I'll demonstrate some applications built with ZOPE, including
   a FAQ application and a query interface to a MySQL (http://www.tcx.se)
   database.