This may or may not be of interest to you, but I have a library that
can provide you with the building blocks to implement some of this
stuff fairly easily. The communications layer has the same interface
for local (Unix domain) connections as for TCP/IP connections, so that
part is already done. Check out:
http://www.atnf.csiro.au/karma/
It's available for Linux as well as many other unices. And the price
is right (free).
Regards,
Richard....