Bill Bumgarner writes:
While I have an active disinterest in Zope compatibility for various reasons, any well designed persistency solution for Python should work just as well within Zope as without.This is a design decision of Ape, and one of the reasons its name has changed (it used to be AdaptableStorage, and also the code layout has changed. I think one could start working with Ape 0.6 and start building something that didn't depend on Zope and (probably) didn't even depend on the ZODB, although the ZODB is a great persistence framework for Python on its own.
Again, the support for Zope is important to me just because I want to make sure that whatever I'm using is aware of Zope's transaction management. Also, there are issues with threads and database connections that not all designs might take into consideration. This affects Twisted as well, as it is an asynchronous framework, which puts special requirements on database access. All of these features can be met and dealt with, and I agree with Bill that a good persistence system for Python should work anywhere. There are definitely enough software patterns out there that one could write software against that transparently deal with the expectations of different environments that should be pluggable and replacable easily for new situations.