Although not a complete protocol per sè, Telnet is a very popular way of communicating. It does have great shortcomings --specifically, the fact that all the information is sent in clear text between hosts-- but they can not be addressed by this wrapper. Most notably, Telnet is character-oriented, while this wrapper is line-oriented.
If encryption of telnet sessions is required and using SSH is for some reason unacceptable, I suggest considering SSLWrapper[9].