I am developing a Web application in Pylons on the Mac. My development server serves pages to http://127.0.0.1:5000/. Is there any way that I can access this page from Parallels for testing with IE without having to set up a development environment in Windows?
The loopback address (127.0.0.1) is only accessible by your local machine. In this case Parallels is considered another (virtual) machine. While Parallels can be configured to use the same IP address as the host operating system, it cannot share the loopback address.
To access pages served on your Mac from Parallels you can change the IP (host) used by Pylons to that of your local network instead of the loopback address. In the development.ini change the host setting.