It's time to reup on my web design skills & need a little help to get started. In the past, I used XAMPP (since I'm on Windows) for PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, etc. Being that I can start with a clean slate, Python seems like an interesting avenue, paired with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. But is really? If MySQL is to PHP, what exactly is ... to Python? Can XAMPP be used with Python? If not, which local server environment would allow you to work using Python? And by the way, the reason I find Python interesting for future app development. I hear Python variations can be used to create mobile device apps after the code has been compiled. As you can see I'm just floatin'. Any help is appreciated.
Look into Django https://www.djangoproject.com/ You can use it with both MySql and PostgreSQL if I'm not mistaken. While you can do it in Windows it would likely be less of a headache for you to try it in a linux vm using VirtualBox instead. You could also signup for the aws free tier and use ec2, s3, and I think rds for a year. If rds isn't included in the free tier you could always install MySql in the ec3 instance.
not necessarily but still possible I believe; python though a server side program like php, it has it's own development environment which can be downloaded from the python official site. The beauty is that it can be integrated with client side programs like javascript.