I may not stay with Django. I am seriously looking for whether python can read data from a relational database and send to an html template or do I always need some kind of wrapper/interface such as Rails or Django? If this is the wrong group to ask that question could you recommend another python group that could?
Python itself comes neither with an ORM, nor with a HTML generating/mapping framework.
So yes, if you want something like that, need something like rails or django. Or TurboGears.
For example, you can use SQLAlchemy as ORM, and RUM as frontend for it. I'm not sure if it fullfills your requirements though.
http://python-rum.org/ Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list