Improved module initialization so that we can do 'import gemfire'
Switch to using Sessions for requests which allows for connection
re-use.

Testing on a simple, local setup with only a single GemFire node shows
an improvement of 25% doing only puts as the overhead of new connection
creation is avoided. Specifically, putting 10000 simple objects dropped
the time from 23 seconds to 17 seconds.
Ignore .pyc files