Zope is a family of free and open-source web application servers written in Python, and their associated online community. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment", and was the first system using the now common object publishing methodology for the Web. Zope has been called a Python killer app, an application that helped put Python in the spotlight. Over the last few years, the Zope community has spawned several additional web frameworks with disparate aims and principles, but sharing philosophy, people, and source code. Zope 2 is still the most widespread of these frameworks, largely thanks to the Plone content management system, which runs on Zope 2. BlueBream (earlier called Zope 3) is less widespread but underlies several large sites, including Launchpad. Grok was started as a more programmer-friendly framework, "Zope 3 for cavemen", and in 2009 Pyramid gained popularity in the Zope community as a minimalistic framework based on Zope principles. History The Zope Corporation was formed in 1995 in Fredericksburg, Virginia under the name Digital Creations, as a joint venture with InfiNet (a joint newspaper chain venture). The company developed a classified advertisement engine for the Internet. In 1997, the company became independently owned and private. The company's software engineers are led by CTO Jim Fulton. PythonLabs, creators of Python, became part of the company in 2000 (Python founder Guido van Rossum left Zope Corp in 2003). What is now known as Zope 2 began with the merging of three separate software products – Bobo, Document Template, and BoboPOS – into the Principia application server. At the behest of its largest investor, Opticality Ventures, Principia was re-released as free software under the name Zope in 1998. Bobo, and therefore Zope, was the first Web object publishing solution. In November 2004, Zope 3 was released. Zope 3 is a complete rewrite that preserves only the original ZODB object database. It is directly intended for enterprise Web application development using the newest development paradigms. Zope 3 is, however, not compatible with Zope 2, so Zope 2 applications do not run on Zope 3. It was originally intended to introduce a backwards-compatibility layer so that Zope 2 software would run on Zope 3. Instead a module known as Five introduced the new Zope 3 paradigms into Zope 2, although full compatibility isn't possible that way either. The existence of two incompatible Web frameworks called Zope has caused a lot of confusion.