Web Based applications

This is a general enquiry. I'd kinda like feedback from both DBA's and Developers.

One of my responsibilities is to look after web sites running on IIS typically talking to Oracle using ADO/OLEDB. These sites get maybe 2500 visitors a day ( say 50,000 get requests). My questions are

1. Do folk recommend OLDEB or do they use OO4O? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each.
2. Typically our developers have almost no error trapping in their .asp pages (both internally and externally developed). I view this as terrible coding. it does however seem to be almost standard in a web environment. Is this me or is this in fact common.
3. What sort of hardware do folk use for a web server experiencing the above sort of load?
4. Most code tends to sit in the asp page itself rather than in a middleware layer written in (say) VB. MY understanding is that after a certain point this becomes unscalable. The question is is there a way to predict when we will reach this point.
5. How well if at all does Oracle interface with Microsft Transaction Server - this last is for a new project that we are assessing - my concerns are about the oracle/MTS combination under intensive processing in a compressed timescale.

So far my cynical impression of the web based revolution is that it delivers poor quality, untested, unscalable code albeit in a quick timeframe. Perhaps this is just me though?

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Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission Uk