The Zope is not for simple RESTful APIs (or Bottle Flask) or even basic sites with interactivity (such as Django). Instead, Zope was created to be a complete enterprise-grade application server stack, similar to the server offerings for Java.

The documentation describes the structure as "most useful for component developers, integrators and web designers". One of the main third-party products, Plone CMS, uses Zope as its substrate and serves as the main driver of Zope's continued development.

It works by taking requests from the web, combining the request parameters against an internal object database (ZODB), and executing that object using the request's GET or POST parameters. Everything that comes back from the object is returned to the customer.

Zope uses this database object system to simplify tasks such as assigning granular object permissions, providing inheritance hierarchies for objects and handling transactions and rollbacks for database objects.

Because of its size and complexity, the installation requires some work; it is not a matter of simply unzipping the source code into a subfolder of the project. Zope uses a specialized configuration tool, zc.buildout, which installs a copy of the Zope source code distribution according to a configuration file. Anyone using the Python package's magament system will back off.

When you start Zope and connect to the server, you will be greeted with a web user interface, where you can create and edit ZODB objects. Objects take on one of three basic functions - content, logic and presentation - and can consist of documents (basically, any file with a MIME type), Python scripts and HTML templates.

Templates can be manipulated using the new and more flexible Zope Page Templates (ZPT) system, or the older, more basic DTML markup system. The ZPT uses properties within HTML tags to indicate where to place the data, making it easier to create models using conventional HTML tools. But the ZPT syntax takes some getting used to.

One of the advantages that Zope claims for its object-oriented methodology is that every action in the system, no matter what type of object it acts on, is encapsulated by a transaction. So, if you delete a file stored in the Zope database or make a destructive change to a piece of code, you just need to reverse the action that performed it.

The downside of the Zope approach is that it is difficult to use modern source control tools like Git on such a code base, and that means you are putting data at the mercy of Zope's custom database tools.

The Information security engineer should work in collaboration with the information security team to offer support to security tools and technologies such as firewall, proxy server, remote access, and others.

Note that you can connect an external database like MySQL to a Zope application, but this is strictly for hosting application data, not for replacing ZODB.