I think it's very interesting to see how various groups of programmers tackle the general problem of creating dynamic websites. (Pardon the sweeping generalizations that follow.)

I cut my teeth on ColdFusion, where you just inject code into the HTML. At least in the early ColdFusion days, most CF developers were web designers for whom CF was their first programming language, so this was a very natural model for them.

I've spent the last few years in the Java camp, where most people subscribe to the "MVC" model where a controller servlet (C) maps requests to business logic classes (M) and presentation templates (V), usually using XML directives to tie the whole thing together. Java programmers tend to think all of the components they write are pluggable and reusable, and that XML is a perfect "glue" language because modifying XML is somehow cheaper than modifying source code.

ASP.NET (and Java Server Faces) bring the paradigm of event-driven UI programming to web apps, allowing Visual Basic style point-and-click programming. (Unfortunately I can't speak from experience here, since I haven't done any ASP.NET programming nor do I know any ASP.NET programmers; but I'm doing a lot of Windows Forms stuff in C#, and it's clear Microsoft worked really hard to make web-based programming the same way.)

Python folks are a peculiar breed. I'm still very new to the language and the community, but in general Python programmers seem to be very clever. Zope looks like a pretty clever framework. I've only spent a couple of hours browsing the docs, so the following may be completely inaccurate, but here goes.

In Zope, you basically publish object graphs. A Zope URL like http://myserver/store/browse/bycategory?categoryid=1 probably maps directly to (zoperoot).store.browse.bycategory(categoryid). This is the first time I've personally heard of a direct containment metaphor for mapping objects to URLs.

Of course there are ways to override this behavior, but this is the basic mapping mechanism. Notice that request parameters are automatically parsed and passed in as arguments. Pretty nice. By default all the arguments are marshalled into strings, but you can specify different marshalling behavior by using special suffixes for your form field names, e.g. <input name="age:int"> will be automatically marshalled into an integer.

I think both the URL mapping and the argument marshalling are really nice; I find them intuitive and concise. However, I can't help but wonder how great it would be if the language for writing these published items was C#, not Python. Static typing and attributes could be great assets here:

[Security(RoleRequired="customer", OnDenied="/login.htm")]
public class Store : ZopeObject
{
  // this could be a property or method if you prefer
  public readonly ZopeObject Browse = new Browse();

  [DefaultPage]  // in lieu of having zope's "index_html" magic method name
  public Response StoreHome()
  {
    // ...whatever...
  }
}

public class Browse : ZopeObject
{
  public Response ByCategory(
    [Label("Category ID"), Required] int categoryId
    )
  {
    // ...whatever...
  }
}

In this example, the security and validation are totally declarative, and the marshalling of the argument is implied by the type. And rather than having to maintain a separate XML file, it's all right here.

(Unfortunately, I have a feeling that writing any kind of web framework that targets .NET will be a losing battle. Microsoft programmers won't use it because it's not Microsoft's recommended framework. Non-Microsoft programmers won't use it because it's .NET.)

Anyway, I haven't even started scratching the surface of Zope. I'll write about other interesting features as I encounter them.