Open source application server gets Twisted
Published: 10 Jan 2006 17:15 GMT
Zope developers have replaced one of their core components in the latest version of the open source application server, bringing potential performance and scalability benefits.
The application server, which was made open source by Zope Corporation in 1998, is primarily used for building content management systems — it's the base of various open source CMS systems including Plone, Silva and Nuxeo CPS.
Zope 3.2.0, which was released at the end of last week, now uses the Web server from the Twisted framework, rather than ZServer, their legacy proprietary Web server.
Twisted, a widely-used networking framework written in Python, supports a large number of protocols and makes it easier for developers to add networking functionality to programs.
Salim Fadhley, an open source developer who builds applications on Zope, told Builder UK on Tuesday that the use of Twisted within Zope is a "big deal" and offers various advantages over ZServer, including better scalability and potential performance benefits.
"Twisted has a good reputation for performance, although bear in mind we are talking about a Web server written in a high-level language here so don't expect the same blistering performance of Apache server which is mainly written in C++," said Fadhley. "Also, [Twisted] has got better thread-safety and has more scalable, cleaner code than Zope's ZServer."
The 3.x branch of Zope was written from scratch a couple of years ago to improve the architecture of the system. Fadhley said he believes this branch is significantly better than earlier versions of Zope, as it is easier to build on.
"The Zope 2.x application server is powerful, widely used but considered to be hard to learn because it's standards were established in the very early days of Python when the Pythonic way of doing things were not as clear as they are today," said Fadhley.
"Zope 3 promises to be the most productive platform for application development. It's taken some of the best minds behind Zope 1 and 2 plus a decade of learning from what is worst in the Java app server market," he said.
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