Service structure

All that said, services aren't necessarily all that complex. If there are operating system facilities available to manage the actual code execution (startup and shutdown), they might not be any more complex, structurally, than the following code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
A simple daemon-like function that can be started from the command-line.
"""
    import syslog
    from time import sleep

    def main_program():
        iterations = 0
        syslog.syslog('Starting %s' % __file__)
        while True:
            # TODO: Perform whatever request-acquisition and response-
            #       generation is needed here...
            syslog.syslog('Event Loop (%d)' % iterations)
            sleep(10)
            iterations += 1
        syslog.syslog('Exiting %s' % __file__)

    if __name__ ==...