[Zope] Persistent Objects

[Roy S. Rapoport]

A coworker of mine wrote his own web server framework from scratch for an
internal application.  We're looking to migrate this application to Zope
(thank God!).  The only question we need to deal with is:  

The reason he wrote his own webserver rather than use CGIs is that there
was some processing that needed to happen to initialize a system state --
basically, create an object that knows about the configuration of some
things.  In his model, this object is created at the beginning and is
simply shared among the various Python objects/modules that are invoked when
responding to user requests.

How can I create such a persistent object that, say, a python script object
or a page template could access?

(Sure, handholding on this would be nice, but what I'm actually expecting
is answers along the lines of "look into <foo>")

-roy