Network pass-through/proxy server questions

[Jos Yule]

Hello all.

I doing a project which uses Macromedia's Flash program and Python. This 
is a 'because i want to see if i can do it' kind of thing, so i know 
that there will be better/easier ways to accomplish what i'm about to 
lay out!

I am going to use a flash app as a kind of chat app, but because Flash 
does not accept incoming socket connections, i'd like to use a small 
Python server to act as the socket proxy (i think that's the right term) 
server. I am going to have a flash app running which will connect to the 
Python server (the chat app), and i just need the Python server to 
accept new client socket connections, and pass the messages received on 
to the flash app.

I've gotten a basic version of this running, where the flash chat app 
connects on port 9999, and the clients connect on port 8888 (just 
example port #).

My biggest problem within the Python code is how to pass a reference to 
the flash app about which socket is associated with which 
message/client. ie. how do i 'number' the messages, so that when they 
are passed to the flash controller, it can then send back messages which 
get sent to the correct client?

I currently have used a 'broadcast' method (using weak refs), but this, 
obviously, is not very efficient, as each socket compares an internal ID 
number against an id which is sent as part of the message from the flash 
controller app. ie. each message from a client has an ID pre-pended to 
it - "001 Hey how's it going?", and messages from the server are similar 
- "001 Kicked due to ineptness"

Is there a way to relate socket objects with some kind of ID, directly, 
without fubaring the garbage collection stuff?

Is this clear, or are you all just going "wtf is he talking about?" ;)

thanks
j

ps. i would like to avoid using Twisted, as i want to learn how to use 
asyncore on its own, and Twisted just seems too big for what i want...
j