Quick Answer: 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 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.