Hey guys, figured I would make a post about this here.
I have created a Counterparty Gateway / vending machine service which could be considered an alternative to vennd. Check out the source here: https://github.com/tokenly/xcp-gateway
At this point it is mostly a prototype, but it will be improving and evolving over the next little while. Contributions are welcome. Also probably am going to re-implement it in Python sometime.
Cheers!