Net::Jabber - Jabber Perl Library
Net::Jabber provides a Perl user with access to the Jabber Instant Messaging protocol.
For more information about Jabber visit:
http://www.jabber.org
Net::Jabber is a convenient tool to use for any perl script that would like to utilize the Jabber Instant Messaging protocol. While not a client in and of itself, it provides all of the necessary back-end functions to make a CGI client or command-line perl client feasible and easy to use. Net::Jabber is a wrapper around the rest of the official Net::Jabber::xxxxxx packages.
There is are example scripts in the example directory that provide you with examples of very simple Jabber programs.
NOTE: The parser that XML::Stream::Parser provides, as are most Perl parsers, is synchronous. If you are in the middle of parsing a packet and call a user defined callback, the Parser is blocked until your callback finishes. This means you cannot be operating on a packet, send out another packet and wait for a response to that packet. It will never get to you. Threading might solve this, but as of the writing of this, threading in Perl is not quite up to par yet. This issue will be revisted in the future.
For a client:
use Net::Jabber;
my $client = new Net::Jabber::Client();
For a component:
use Net::Jabber;
my $component = new Net::Jabber::Component();
The Net::Jabber module does not define any methods that you will call directly in your code. Instead you will instantiate objects that call functions from this module to do work. The three main objects that you will work with are the Message, Presence, and IQ modules. Each one corresponds to the Jabber equivilant and allows you get and set all parts of those packets.
For more information on each of these packages, please see the man page for each one.
This package contains the code needed to communicate with a Jabber server: login, wait for messages, send messages, and logout. It uses XML::Stream to read the stream from the server and based on what kind of tag it encounters it calls a function to handle the tag.
This package contains the code needed to write a server component. A component is a program tha handles the communication between a jabber server and some outside program or communications pacakge (IRC, talk, email, etc...) With this module you can write a full component in just a few lines of Perl. It uses XML::Stream to communicate with its host server and based on what kind of tag it encounters it calls a function to handle the tag.
A collection of high-level functions that Client and Component use to make their lives easier through inheritance.
The Jabber IDs consist of three parts: user id, server, and resource. This module gives you access to those components without having to parse the string yourself.
Everything needed to create and read a <message/> received from the server.
Everything needed to create and read a <presence/> received from the server.
IQ is a wrapper around a number of modules that provide support for the various Info/Query namespaces that Jabber recognizes.
This module represents a namespaced stanza that is used to extend a <message/>, <presence/>, and <iq/>. Ultimately each namespace is documented in a JEP of some kind. http://jabber.org/jeps/
The man page for Net::Jabber::Stanza contains a listing of all supported namespaces, and the methods that are supported by the objects that represent those namespaces.
Jabber allows for any stanza to be extended by any bit of XML. This module contains all of the internals for defining the Jabber based extensions defined by the JEPs. The documentation for this module explains more about how to add your own custom namespace and have it be supported.
Ryan Eatmon
This module is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.