The SOPE package is an extensive set of frameworks (16 frameworks, ~1500 classes) which form a complete Web application server environment. Besides the Apple WebObjects compatible appserver extended with Zope concepts, it contains a large set of reusable classes: XML processing (SAX2, DOM, XML-RPC), MIME/IMAP4 processing, LDAP connectivity, RDBMS connectivity, and iCalendar parsing.

• Helge Hess (project lead)
• Marcus Mueller
• Wolfgang Sourdeau
• Frank Reppin
• Bjoern Stierand
• Jean-Alexis Montignies
• Stephane Corthesy
• Sebastian Reitenbach
• Thierry Delhaise
• Giulio Cesare Solaroli
• Christian Kesselheim
• Florian G. Pflug
• Nicola Pero
• Mirko Viviani
• Mont Rothstein
• Philippe Laval
• Matthew Joice
• Max Berger
• Sebastian Ley
• Thomas Woerner
• Jan Reichmann
• Martin Hoerning
• Martin Spindler

SOPE was started in 1996 as a basis for building Internet and Intranet applications at the MDlink online service center. At the time we liked the ideas behind the NeXT WebObjects frameworks and decided to build something which provides similiar capabilities on the Linux platform.

SOPE was then used as the basis for the Skyrix Web Groupware Server, which is now known as OpenGroupware.org.
When Skyrix released their groupware server as free software in 2003, the SOPE frameworks got released in the same run, also under the terms of the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).

Since about 2002 we started to add new concepts to SOPE, primarily based on ideas from the Zope application server. Hence the new name.