New version of Parallel UserAgent (2.2)

Marc Langheinrich (marclang@cs.washington.edu)
Wed, 23 Jul 1997 13:21:42 -0700 (PDT) 

Get the latest version at

        http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/marclang/ParallelUA/ 

What is it?
-----------
 ParallelUserAgent allows you to connect to multiple sites _in parallel_!
 You can register a number of requests, then call the 'wait' method
 and see how the requests come in as each server responds.

 ParallelUserAgent is basically an extension of the current UserAgent and 
 RobotUA modules that come with libwww5. It updates four existing LWP modules
 (Protocol.pm, UserAgent.pm, Protocol/http.pm and Protocol/ftp.pm) and 
 adds the ParallelUA.pm and RobotPUA.pm module. The updated modules 
 should be fully compatible to the latest libwww5.10 release - this way 
 you can use both the parallel version of a UserAgent (i.e. ParallelUA) 
 _and_ the standard one that comes with libwww with the same LWP 
 distribution. (once you updated those four files, that is)

Check it out!

What's new?
-----------
 Version 2.2 
  - Compatible to latest libwww (Version 5.10)!! 
  - Finally: FTP Support added! 
  - Use of Alarm-Timeout fixed (the old code would break every so often).
  - Still not enough documentation :(

 Version 2.1
  - Offers now two modes for making connections, one fast but unordered, 
    one slightly slower, but ordered (in_order method)
  - Able to ignore duplicate requests (and ignores these): duplicates
    method
  - Override on_connect, on_failure and on_return methods to provide
    custom messages or actions for connections made, failed connections and 
    returned connections. 
  - Way behind with documentation :(
  - Lots of random bugfixes

 Version 1.21
  - The register method won't connect anymore - connections are now
    exclusivley made within the wait method. (that means you can register as 
    many requests as you like without actually connecting)  
  - You can now subclass from ParallelUA (or RobotPUA) and 
    provide custom messages by redefining on_connect and on_return methods. 
    (see the TestScript.pl for an example) 
  - Bug fixes. 

What's missing?
---------------

 No convenient "make" installation yet. You'll have to manually copy the 
 source files into your perl library directory, or keep them in a local 
 subdirectory that you include via the "use lib" pragma.

What's coming?
--------------
 Version 2.3  (still needs some testing & documentation)
  - will come with WWW::PSearch, the parallel Web Search Module (a 
    re-implementation of the WWW::Search module that makes use
    of ParallelUA) that gives you _parallel_ access to your favourite 
    search engines!



Marc
---
Marc Langheinrich                  Department of Computer Science & Engr.
office phone: (206) 543-5129       University of Washington, Box 352350, 
email: marclang@cs.washington.edu  Seattle, WA 98195-2350, USA
www: http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/marclang/