There are two different problems. One is the medium to pass messages, sockets are good but there are other options and depends on your requirement you need to pick the best one. The other is serialization format, here you have marshal, pickle, JSON, XML and more.
For me JSON over sockets works well in the past. It has the nice property that you can read messages without need for a special decoder (like in the case of marshal/pickle). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
