Need some IPC pointers

[Andrew Berg]

I've done some research, but I'm not sure what's most appropriate for my
situation. What I want to do is have a long running process that spawns
processes (that aren't necessarily written in Python) and communicates
with them. The children can be spawned at any time and communicate at
any time. Being able to communicate with non-local processes would be
nice, but is not necessary. The implementation needs to be
cross-platform, but child processes will use the same OS as the parent
during runtime.
I don't think I'll ever need to transfer anything complicated or large -
just strings or possibly tuples/lists. I'd rather not go outside the
standard library (but I'd consider it). I don't need to worry about
compatibility with older Python versions; if it only works with Python
3.2, that's not a problem.
I'm thinking sockets, but perhaps there's something simpler/easier.

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