$Id: README,v 1.69 2001/04/20 19:04:34 rcaputo Exp $ ----------- What POE Is ----------- POE is an application kernel that uses event driven state machines as threads. It includes a high-level I/O library that hides most of the usual client/server tediosity. It has been developed and used in mission-critical systems since August 1998. --------------------- Documentation Roadmap --------------------- The POE manpage's SEE ALSO section lists the topics covered in each manpage. It's a good starting place. -------------------- Distribution Details -------------------- This distribution comes with several sample and tutorial programs in its samples/ directory. These programs are NOT installed because they have limited use and take up a lot of space and have limited use. They will be split into a separate distribution in the near future. The lib/ directory includes a few useful utilities, including a relatively portable bidirectional pipe creator. There's also a small test coverage module, harness, and report. The test coverage summary at the end of this file was generated by that system. These utilities aren't installed either. The test programs, in t/, may also be interesting examples, although they're more geared towards exercising POE. The tests also aren't installed. All in all, the actual installed bits of POE are probably around a third of the total distribution, and about a quarter of B is documentation. ------------------ Basic Installation ------------------ POE may be installed through the CPAN shell in the usual CPAN shell manner. It typically is: perl -MCPAN -e 'install POE' It involves a little more work if you have an older CPAN shell: perl -MCPAN -e shell install POE -------------------------- Getting The Latest Version -------------------------- POE can also be installed manually. Tarballs are available from at least three sources: The most recent stable release can be found at your favorite CPAN mirror. If you don't have a favorite CPAN mirror, there's always: ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/R/RC/RCAPUTO/ The most recent development snapshot is available from two locations: http://poe.perl.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/poe/ The SourceForge project includes a CVS repository browser, so you can look around to see what's new. It also has facilities for people to submit bug reports, patches, and support requests. --------------------------- Building The Latest Version --------------------------- Downloading and unpacking the distribution are left as an exercise for the reader. See the previous section for tarball locations. System requirements and copatibility issues are covered in the main POE manpage. You can preview them before building POE. perldoc ./POE.pm Please read the Changes file if you already have programs which use POE. Sometimes there are changes that break compatibility with older versions, and the Changes file can tell you about them before you install POE. less ./Changes If everything looks good, build POE. perl Makefile.PL make Then test the distribution. This is an important step since it also ferrets out the modules POE needs. It reports on the POE components which won't work because of missing dependencies, and it recommends things to install. Please read the dependency report carefully. make test Now you're ready to install POE, but first you may want to look at its samples. Some of the samples may not work; the important thing is that the tests pass. All the programs in the samples subdirectory are written to run from the distribution directory without POE being installed yet. cd ./samples ls -l [try some] cd .. Finally you can install it: make install ------------ Test Results ------------ All the tests have been made to run unattended, and testing has been automated across the systems. ** POE 0.13 on FreeBSD (home-bsd) Hardware: Athlon-1000; 512MB RAM System : FreeBSD 4.3-RC Perl : 5.6.1 Gtk : 0.7005 Tk : 800.022 Event : 0.81 IO::Pty : 0.01 All tests successful. Files=25, Tests=467, 85 wallclock secs ( 6.77 cusr + 0.62 csys = 7.39 CPU) ** POE 0.1206 on Linux (titanic) Hardware: dual Celeron 500; 265MB RAM System : Linux 2.2.15 SMP Perl : v5.6.0 Gtk : (not installed) Tk : (not installed) Event : 0.79 IO::Pty : 0.01 All tests successful, 2 tests skipped. Files=24, Tests=438, 75 wallclock secs (15.56 cusr + 0.83 csys = 16.39 CPU) ** POE 0.1205 on Solaris/SunOS 5.7 (hfb) Hardware: SPARCstation-20; dual Sparc-75; 320MB RAM System : SunOS 5.7 Perl : 5.005_03 Gtk : (not installed) Tk : (not installed) Event : (not installed) IO::Pty : 0.01 All tests successful, 4 tests skipped. Files=24, Tests=429, 122 wallclock secs (61.70 cusr + 5.49 csys = 67.19 CPU) ** POE 0.1203 on Linux (a-mused) Hardware: Celeron 600; unknown RAM System : Linux 2.4.0-test12 Perl : 5.005_03 Gtk : (unknown) Tk : (not installed) Event : (installed; unknown version) All tests successful, 2 tests skipped. Files=23, Tests=415, 98 wallclock secs (14.22 cusr + 0.63 csys = 14.85 CPU) ** POE 0.1203 on Solaris/SunOS 5.8 (dynweb) Hardware: SPARCstation-80; 2x UltraSparc II-450; 1GB RAM System : SunOS 5.7 Perl : 5.6.0 Gtk : (not installed) Tk : (not installed) Event : 0.80 All tests successful, 2 tests skipped. Files=23, Tests=415, 98 wallclock secs (14.03 cusr + 0.99 csys = 15.02 CPU) ------------- Test Coverage ------------- The test coverage numbers are statistically meaningless. Still, 100% coverage is a fun goal. Increasing the coverage percents gives the author some small sense of accomplishment, and it assures users that something's being done to assure POE's quality. These results are for POE 0.1205 on the FreeBSD test machine. This machine is the slowest of the bunch, but it also has the most support libraries installed. Source File = Ran / Total = Covered POE.pm = 23 / 24 = 95.83% POE/Component.pm = 5 / 5 = 100.00% POE/Component/Server/TCP.pm = 26 / 26 = 100.00% POE/Driver.pm = 5 / 5 = 100.00% POE/Driver/SysRW.pm = 42 / 54 = 77.78% POE/Filter.pm = 5 / 5 = 100.00% POE/Filter/Block.pm = 37 / 37 = 100.00% POE/Filter/HTTPD.pm = 11 / 89 = 12.36% POE/Filter/Line.pm = 79 / 84 = 94.05% POE/Filter/Reference.pm = 60 / 66 = 90.91% POE/Filter/Stream.pm = 11 / 11 = 100.00% POE/Kernel.pm = 664 / 867 = 76.59% POE/Kernel/Event.pm = 1 / 9 = 11.11% POE/Kernel/Select.pm = 6 / 12 = 50.00% POE/NFA.pm = 76 / 160 = 47.50% POE/Pipe/OneWay.pm = 20 / 39 = 51.28% POE/Pipe/TwoWay.pm = 23 / 43 = 53.49% POE/Preprocessor.pm = 155 / 187 = 82.89% POE/Session.pm = 148 / 203 = 72.91% POE/Wheel.pm = 11 / 11 = 100.00% POE/Wheel/FollowTail.pm = 75 / 97 = 77.32% POE/Wheel/ListenAccept.pm = 39 / 55 = 70.91% POE/Wheel/ReadWrite.pm = 113 / 194 = 58.25% POE/Wheel/Run.pm = 142 / 243 = 58.44% POE/Wheel/SocketFactory.pm = 203 / 241 = 84.23% All Told = 1980 / 2767 = 71.56% Thanks for reading! -- Rocco Caputo / troc@netrus.net / poe.perl.org / poe.sourceforge.net