I don't remember Python ever having a driving force equivalent to Rails. Ruby was a somewhat obscure language before Rails, regardless of its strenghts. I got into Python because of Zope, but the world would be a much, much better place had it been as popular as Rails.

I'm glad Zope lost, and that has nothing to do with Python.

Zope was just a morass of over-complication. I remember buying the zope book sometime in the early 00s.

I was initially impressed with the completeness, but found it to be overly-complex and ugly to work with. Rails + Django happened for a reason.

Now, I haven't played with it in maybe 8 years, but I'd say pre-rails it was just not as elegant.

I see you met Zope 2. There is still a lot of it under Plone.

Neither Rails nor Django appeared on the radar before Zope 3 and Zope 3 is much a nicer platform than 2 (they applied a lot of lessons learned when making it). Grok is even more interesting, as it brings the convention over configuration to Zope 3 (Zope Corp does a lot of government contracts where, I assume, XML configuration files were mandated by clueless PHBs)

Also, had Zope been more successful at that time, it would have captured a lot of space that's now owned by Sharepoint and EJB messes.

While it is true that Ruby became popular because of Rails, it is no longer true that Ruby is only popular in the area of Rails nowadays.

Speaking as someone who used to write Zope 2 apps, allow me to say no. Hell, no.

Zope < 3.0 was a convoluted mess of two over-engineered applications named Bobo and Principia that were hacked together.

That's why the API had functions names like:

  bobobase_modification_time 
  principia_is_folderish

That's why Zope 3 was rewritten from scratch.

Zope 3 has a sane, albeit complex, architecture. Regretably it came too late into the game and by the time it was ready, every Python web developer had moved to turbogears or something else.

The only interesting piece of technology from Zope was the ZODB. I wish it had developed as a separate product.

> the world would be a much, much better place had it been as popular as Rails.

Why?

No relational database sort of hidden under an object-relational mapper, a template language where the template is valid HTML are two reasons that pop out promptly. Also, Python would be more popular now, perhaps taking some space from things far uglier than Python or Ruby.

Just imagine the joy of using ZODB instead of EJB's layered on top of Oracle databases.

I don't understand why having your template be valid HTML is even a little bit good (I'm not saying it's bad — I just don't see why it's better than anything else). I don't think sending unprocessed templates as pages is a common use case, so there is zero benefit in having them be in a language that a browser can render unmodified.