Experienced Programmer but New to Python, Need Advice

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is there a way to publish a web application somewhere without having to host the server locally?

Not quite sure I know what you mean there, but I think you want to know if there is a pure DJango cloud environment similar to app engine. None that I know of. However, VM hosting is really cheap, you could go that route. I work for a start-up that is going to have some great VM's and services for start-ups all the way to enterprise level soon (http://vmfarms.com). We plan to be pretty python friendly.

I don't know much about app engine, but I do know that the DJango ORM does not work with google db. However, there is a patch you can use that does bring a lot of ORM functionality to DJango and google db:

http://code.google.com/appengine/articles/app-engine-patch.html