For me, the biggest pain point for developing PyAres services right now is the difficulty of debugging. To this end I suggest some helper classes/functions that make it easy to emulate the communication between ARES OS and a PyARES service. I envision this as a class or function that you can provide the port of the service to be tested and a dict of the fields/values, which will format an appropriate message to the service and then provide its response for analysis.