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I'm trying to write a program in Python that helps abstract payment providers away, depending on the persons' location/mobile service provider. So far I've come up with the following workflow:

1. take some HTTP POST/GET data from the end user (I think POST is best)
2. check the IP, decide which payment provider to use, perhaps looking something up in a MySQL table here
3. Formulate a HTTP GET/POST request to the chosen payment provider's server (more database lookups here)
4. Send the request, parse the response from the payment provider's system, record the whole transaction in a database
5. tell the user everything is ok

But I'm not really sure how. Python has threaded HTTP server classes - maybe I can subclass them, and customize them to do what I want them to do. That was what I was thinking. But then I read about Python WSGI and https://docs.python.org/3.4/howto/webservers.html. Is this what a web framework is supposed to simplify? If so then I can modify Django or something to suit my purposes, right? In the end there has to be a sort of CMS where one can manage all aspects of this process, but it's only an addition, the important part is the part that decides which payment provider to use. There's no need to generate many HTML pages for the end user. And how does WSGI fit into all this?

Pylons comes to mind almost immediately, although it and some of the other frameworks may be more complex than what you really need. http://www.pylonsproject.org/

A full-bore CMS that builds on Pylons is called Plone: https://plone.org/

Django is another one: https://www.djangoproject.com/ (ah, I see you've already spotted Django)

Another network engine that is actually a little lower-level than either of those two is Twisted: https://twistedmatrix.com/trac/
Twisted can do a bunch of networking stuff, including web services.

As for "WSGI", while I don't do a bunch of web service development, it appears to be a common communication format that Python uses to let multiple web services talk to each other. As such, it is not so much a finished product that you use, but an API/protocol that you use to be compatible with existing projects that are also WSGI compatible.

WSGI is how a webserver can communicate with a Python web application. WSGI is a better cgi, basically.

You'll probably want to configure Apache, Nginx, or whatever to run in front of the Python application in production.

Webserver --(WSGI spec)--> Python Application

1) POST is good here since this part will deal with enduser data.
2) There are GeoIP modules that will map an IP to geographic location that can be used.
3) urllib
4) SQLAlchemy will simplify dealing with a database.
5) The framework will deal with this.

Flask is another python framework to look at. It's more of a toolkit then a full-fledged framework like Django, but it's pretty neat.

Flask homepage
http://flask.pocoo.org/

Flask Mega Tutorial
http://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/the ... ello-world