inetd + wsgi
Python's WSGI protocol is an amazing piece of work. I'm building a small application for myself, parsing some text and generating a report, and I want to access the results via a web browser (the simplest friendly user interface there is). I don't like the idea of keeping around a server process just for this, so inetd (or rather, Apple's launchd, since I'm on a mac) was the perfect solution.
After some googling turned up nothing I decided to roll my own. Long story short, Python's SocketServer and friends are great pieces of reusable code, the wsgiref.simple_server module does all the HTTP/WSGI work, and all I had to do was override a couple of methods from the WSGIServer class.
The code is on gist: inetd_wsgi.py. Every request spawns a new Python process to handle it, so this is sub-optimal, but I think launchd (and maybe inetd or xinetd? I don't know) supports reusing processes. Since I want this to run on my iPod, I'll be investigating.