Re: Please review new Perl 5 Module List

Jack Shirazi - BIU (js@bison.lif.icnet.uk)
Tue, 28 Feb 95 16:39:24 GMT 

> I really like this design. Is there anything we've missed out that we
> might regret? It looks like client-side format transformation and
> caching can be added without upsetting the API. I guess interrupts and
> multi-threading might be different, but will probably have to wait
> until Perl supports it anyway... We will need HTML parsing, but that
> should be completely separate. Anything else?

Unfortunately I've only been skimming, and can't contribute to the
design discussion at the moment. But one thing I'd just like to check -
as far as I remember, some URLs allow for a password request to be
sent back to the client from the server - which should then be handled
in the interface and then the client 'completes' the URL  - please
correct me if I have the particulars wrong.

In its current format, libwww can't handle this (at least not without
rewriting). Do the suggested callbacks for chunk handling provide a
method for handling this? Or does this need to be taken into account
elsewhere.

Also ftp connections are fairly tiresome using web clients because of
the repeated connections - a simple optimization for any client is that
when the URL is to a directory rather than a file, to keep the
connection open for a limited amount of time, and just send further
requests to that host along the retained connection (typically you
traverse some directories, then pick up a file or two)
 - again, does the current perl5 design support this, or is the
connection/response/close-connection hardwired?

Finally, how easy is it to inherit a package from the WWW::Whatever, so that I
can design a nice customized version? Remember that a good design means
that I'll inherit all the defaults and should only need to redefine the subs
affecting the parts I want to customize.

I really must apologize that I cannot contribute more to the current discussion,
its a busy time at the moment. But I'd like to emphasize that rather than go
releasing the perl5 version early, we should try to get the design as nice
as possible - I'm sure we've all been in at a redesign phase of existing
hardware and seen how much you'd like to dump but can't because of needing
to keep it backwardly compatible.