Trying to understand Python web-development

[walterbyrd]

I don't know much php either, but running a php app seems straight
forward enough.

Python seems to always use some sort of development environment vs
production environment scheme. For development, you are supposed to
run a local browser and load 127.0.0.1:5000 - or something like that.
Then to run the same thing in a development environment, I have to
configure some files, or touch all the files, restart the web-server,
or something. Why is that?

Python also seems to require some sort of "long running processes" I
guess that the python interpretor has to running all of time.

I am not really sure about what wsgi is supposed to accomplish.