[Zope] Architectural questions

[Roberto Faria]

Hi everyone,

I have recently joined a small software development team in South Africa 
comprising of the best object people in the country.  We have been tasked 
to build a financial supermarket using the numerous distribution channels 
including the web, fax, email, wap. I am currently investigating the 
suitability of using Zope to implement my presentation layer (as apposed to 
using Java servlets). To complete my Zope study I need to answers to the 
following:
(1)     Is the Zope VM threaded? Do the VMs get pooled? What happens if a 
VM gets bloated and old?
(2)     Is there a limit to the number of objects in a Zope repository? Who 
is currently running the biggest Zope site in terms of Objects and hits per 
day? How many repositories are being used? Do you guys know of any other 
large python driven websites?
(3)     How does ZEO ensure View consistency when numerous clients are 
transacting?  How are transaction conflicts handled?
(4)     Where is the transaction log stored? How does one rebuild a Zope 
database after a server crash? Can transactions be lost?
(5)     How does a development team debug DTML?
(6)     Does Zope provide any resource pooling such as the J2EE products?
(7)     How does one provide a 24x7 service? What happens if you need to 
upgrade the Zope server?
(8)     When will the object database provide indexed collections?

Thanks in advance
Roberto