FREDERICKSBURG, Va., October 30, 2002 /InternetWire/ -- Zope Corporation, leader in open source content management and developers of ZopeŽ, the leading open source web application server, has funded the development of ESI in Squid (www.squid-cache.org).

ESI (Edge Side Includes - www.esi.org) is an important markup language used to define web page fragments for dynamic assembly and delivery, improving the user experience of web applications. The protocol was pioneered by Akamai and is endorsed by Oracle, BEA Systems, Digital Island, IBM, Interwoven, Vignette and others. Applications that support ESI typically require less hardware and bandwidth to serve significantly greater amounts of users and hits with greater performance.

Zope Corporation contracted with the core development team of the Open Source Squid Web Proxy Caching Server to add ESI support, which they knew would yield dramatic ROI. Squid brings the benefits of ESI to the Open Source world, as well as enabling companies to deploy ESI entirely within their own networks.

An upcoming version of Zope will fully support the automatic generation of ESI directives to take advantage of Squid's capability. By selecting Squid as the deployment engine for ESI delivery, Zope Corporation has made ESI available to every other web publishing system capable of supporting ESI directives, with no cost involved.

"Zope already powers very high-performance Content Management sites," said Rob Page, CEO of Zope Corporation. "With the addition of ESI in Squid, performance scales dramatically. Network topology choices increase, while complexity decreases. Personalization no longer has to come at the expense of cacheability."

"We are happy to have worked with Zope Corporation to bring ESI to the world's most popular proxy server, Squid, and to expand the range of open source web publishing tools available," said Robert Collins, one of Squid's core developers.

"The centralized model of Web serving has shifted towards more efficient infrastructure technologies that leverage the Internet's edge for distributed computing," said Bill Weihl, CTO of Akamai Technologies. "The development of ESI is one such technology that is impacting the way enterprise applications are written and deployed. We are excited by the work of Zope Corporation to develop ESI in Squid. This will dramatically help in the creation of dynamic, open source applications, while also allowing enterprises to extend the reach of their applications across the Akamai platform. We look forward to this being one of many third party implementations of ESI."

About Zope
Zope is the leading open source application server, specializing in content management, portals, and custom applications. Since Zope Corporation introduced Zope as an open source product in 1998, it has become the platform of choice for content publishers, managers and application developers. Zope comes with complete source code, and no software licensing fees. There are over 20,000 developers around the world contributing to Zope, providing on-going support and enhancements. More information, including the Zope source code, is available at www.zope.com.

About Zope Corporation
Zope Corporation is the leading provider of enterprise content management solutions based on the open source Zope application server and its new Content Management Framework (CMF). Zope Corporation rapidly creates and deploys high-performance content management solutions that are scalable, reliable, and easily maintained. Source code is delivered with their systems, so clients have complete control over their software. Customers include Fortune 1000 companies, newspapers and other media, telecommunications firms, government agencies, the military, educational institutions and Internet businesses. Zope Corporation is backed by Opticality Ventures www.opticality.com. The company is headquartered in Virginia. For more on Zope Corporation and Zope visit www.zope.com.

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