[jcc: I found this on the Zope Classic site, and couldn't just let it moulder there. I have no idea who wrote it, but it's still live last I checked at this page. This page corrected for links and new dtml syntax.]

Bobo and Principia become Zope

Zope derives from a fusion of Bobo, an existing open source software toolkit, and Principia, a commercial application server built on that toolkit which is now being released as open source.

For more on the motivations behind our move to open source see the open source business decision document.

Bobo provides the platform's core components. These components have been developed and refined over the course of two years by Digital Creations and the active community of programmers that has grown up around the project.

Principia is a mature and easy to use web application platform built on Bobo that allows high-performance applications to be constructed and managed through the web, without writing any code. Principia provides a simple HTML interface to the web object system, many ready to use web objects, and an API for building well-integrated web objects. Customers of Principia include national newspapers, web hosting companies, and the federal government.

Bobo Origin Myth

According to legend, Jim Fulton (Digital Creations' Technical Director) developed the idea that would become Bobo after having taught a frustrating Python CGI tutorial at a 1996 Python Workshop. Fulton had long been an object proponent and he knew there had to be a better way to do web programming than CGI. Later that year Digital Creations came back to the Python Conference to deliver several papers on the freshly completed Bobo web ORB.

Bobo was released as free software and over the next two years a community of developers coalesced around it. At the same time Digital Creations built a commercial product called Principia on top of Bobo.

This year Digital Creations came to the Python Conference once again, this time to announce that Digital Creations would be open sourcing Bobo's commercial big brother, Principia.