I want to use a Python framework that handles sessions (user auth), templating along with MySQL database access (although I can use MySQLdb quite nicely)
Tornado looks promising but, I just can't see how to use it. The sample given has a port listen feature. Does it replace Apache? Exactly how do I configure my server (Centos 5.4) and LAMP setup for this, or is there a better option?
If you setup tornado via LAMP (apache with mod_wsgi for example) you will lose every single async option in tornado, significant amount of memory and speed.
It's highly recomended to use nginx for serving static files and proxying dynamic requests to the tornado application instance.
python tornado setup