For those who do use inetd, you might be interested in xinetd which has some access controls. I've been using this for years as well for very simple apps and it "just works."
It's open source and POSIX, so you can use it even if you aren't on a Mac. It's pretty cool, from a design standpoint.
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/instances.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2011-Sep...
I’d appreciate a more informed comparison.