If I was an ISP, I'd be wildly more receptive to mod_fastcgi (or mod_pcgi, if it existed) than a module that embedded a perl or python interpreter in the web server.
There is no need to embed a python interpreter in apache. Just write code in C that can pass the object requests through to zope and receive a response that is handed back to the client. It shouldn't be hard to write at all. I stated it once, but I haven't had a chance to finish. The important thing is that the listener on the zope side is multi-threaded so that concurrent requests into apache don't block waiting for a single transaction to process inside zope (this was the way pcgi was working last time I looked). If you had to, you could just rewrite the url and send another http request to zope. If zope supported some kind of persistent connection so the socket didn't have to be opening and closing all the time, it would still be reasonably fast. No worse than a proxy server, anyway. --sam