Need advice on choosing the technology for intranet based application

[Nenad Propadovic]

Hello pythonistas,
I'm about to write an application related to injury prevention in big
industrial companies. It's supposed to be intranet-based (because the admins
are reluctant to install it on x (where x>>1) clients). So: the client is a
web-browser. I still don't know whether I will get a server on my own, or
I'll have to fit into an unknown web server environment, both options being
realistic.
By now it seems the logic of the application will be simple. It's going to
be a relational database with several tables, a modest number of users with
write priviledges, some more with read priviledges only. Performance is not
a big issue.
The GUI has a part I consider complex: I have to present some statistics in
form of charts or graphs.
Now I've never done any web based application in my life, have a very
rudimentary knowledge of HTML, have been doing som database hacking (O.K.,
engineering :-) ) with MS Access and Ingress/ Open Road, have once written a
socket-based combined telnet/ftp client.
So I kindly ask for knowledgeable opinions on the following question:
-which web/application server? I'm considering Zope (seams rather BIG when
you download & unpack it, and it seams all possible web applications have
been written for it) and twisted (smaller, seams lower lewel and somewhat
easier to learn), and I'm wondering if there is something else out there,
which is both powerfull and flexible and easy to learn and complete. Oh yes,
I have both a time constraint (mid november, having only my spare time for
the project), and don't want end up rewritting the stuff under another
system, because the chosen one isn't flexible enough. Database included
would be nice.
-I assume the simplest way to present a graph/chart kind of graphic is to
create a jpg/giff/tiff on the server side, and just show it on the client?
Thanks to everybody taking the time to read the message, and even more to
those who answer it :-)
Cheers,
Nenad Propadovic
P.S. I'm just introducing Python to my group at BMW (a completely different
project, though), and I'll let you know if there are some bigger success
stories.