Of course it is nice to have a consistent method of starting and stopping services. I would argue that development servers are in more need for the daemontools package. The usefulness is in being able to start, stop and restart. There is even an option for start once. Almost every service I run uses daemontools svc. For web services I have a directory structure like the following:
in /web/control/server1/ :
drwxr-sr-x 2 server1 web log
-rwx------ 1 root root run
-rw-r----- 1 server1 web server1-nsd.tcl
drwx--s--- 2 root web supervise
in /web/control/server1/log/ :
-rw-r----- 1 server1 web server1-error.log
With these permissions, anyone in the web group can control server1. More information in
http://zmbh.com/daemontools-aolserver/
