Lightwight socket IO wrapper

[James Harris]

I guess there have been many attempts to make socket IO easier to handle 
and a good number of those have been in Python.

The trouble with trying to improve something which is already well 
designed (and conciously left as is) is that the so-called improvement 
can become much more complex and overly elaborate. That can apply to the 
initial idea, for sure, but when writing helper or convenience functions 
perhaps it applies more to the temptation to keep adding just a little 
bit extra. The end result can be overly elaborate such as a framework 
which is fine where such is needed but is overkill for simpler 
requirements.

Do you guys have any recommendations of some *lightweight* additions to 
Python socket IO before I write any more of my own? Something built in 
to Python would be much preferred over any modules which have to be 
added. I had in the back of my mind that there was a high-level 
socket-IO library - much as threading was added as a wrapper to the 
basic thread module - but I cannot find anything above socket. Is there 
any?

A current specific to illustrate where basic socket IO is limited: it 
normally provides no guarantees over how many bytes are transferred at a 
time (AFAICS that's true for both streams and datagrams) so the 
delimiting of messages/records needs to be handled by the sender and 
receiver. I do already handle some of this myself but I wondered if 
there was a prebuilt solution that I should be using instead - to save 
me adding just a little bit extra. ;-)

James