NuclearVision,
what rahmu mentioned is correct. I would have to disagree on the choice of Django or Flask in your case.
If you're just getting started with web development (which is rather clear based on what you've mentioned so far), using a fully fledged framework such as Django (or a simpler one such as Flask) will definitely not help you on the long run. If you use Django, you'll get things done, but you will definitely not know how things are done; There's way too much magic in Django, to a point where, you would think you're using python but in fact you're simply following a convention that does things for you. Moreover, there are a lot of modules in django that you will not need or use, but the fact that they're there may scare you away.
The most important task for you to do right now as rahmu mentioned is to learn these in the following order:
1- Networking in Python : Sockets (Client/Server)
Build directory server that stores People contacts
Build a client that connects to this server and allows you to request/add contacts
Use
plain sockets, do not use any remoting libraries whatsoever.
At this point you should have a small understanding about how network applications work. The 'way' your client and server are able to react to one another is basically a dialect. The dialect in the world of networking is called a Protocol. Let's call this protocol NVCP (short for NuclearVision Contacts Protocol)
2- What is HTTP?
Just as NVCP is the protocol that your server understands, HTTP is the protocol that Webservers understand. I will not elaborate on this for now, so i'll leave it up to you to read and ask questions if necessary.
3- Play with existing HTTP Clients
Use the module that rahmu
suggested. This library is to a webserver, what your Contacts client is to your server. Use it to request pages from a webserver, or use it to build a terminal web browser, it's up to you.
4- Implement your own web scripts
Up to this point, you haven't created any script that runs (or is dispatched to) by/from webservers. Normally I would suggest you play around with CGI but as we're in 2012, CGI has faded away in the world of python and is replaced by WSGI.
So my final suggestion to you, is to read and play around with WSGI through this
tutorial.
I promise you, once you've done these steps, you're ahead of most developers I know.