$Id: README,v 1.89 2001/08/29 13:25:31 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. The CHANGES file lists nearly every change made to POE since 1998, including ones which have broken backward compatibility. The backward-breaking changes are marked with exclamation points so they stand out. The TODO file includes a roadmap of changes which may break backward compatibility. Each change includes dates of earliest breakage, which means you have at least until those dates to update critical programs. -------------------- 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. The lib/ directory includes a few useful utilities, including a basic 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, in case you were wondering. 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. The generally usable bits of POE are pretty small. ------------------ 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 To install on a Win32 machine using ActiveState's PPM: ppm install http://poe.sourceforge.net/packages/POE.ppd -------------------------- Getting The Latest Version -------------------------- POE can also be installed manually, although Win32 users are recommended to use the PPM instead. 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 and TODO files if you already have programs which use POE. They contain advance notice of changes which may break existing code. less ./CHANGES less ./TODO 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 be stale: they might not work with the most recent distribution, but everything is okay as long as "make test" has passed. 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 ------------ Thanks to a-mused and dynweb for their testing time. Someday SourceForge will get its compile farm together again, and I'll be able to add six more test systems to this list. The wallclock seconds are constrained mainly by delays within the tests themselves. For a more accurate determination of POE's speed, balance the CPU seconds against the test machine's hardware and operating system. ** POE 0.16 on FreeBSD (dngor) Hardware: Athlon-1000; 512MB RAM System : FreeBSD 4.3-STABLE Perl : 5.6.1 Gtk : 0.7008 Tk : 800.023 Event : 0.83 IO::Pty : 0.01 All tests successful. Files=26, Tests=578, 84 wallclock secs ( 7.73 cusr + 0.66 csys = 8.40 CPU) ** POE 0.1502 on Solaris 8 (dynweb) Hardware: Ultra-80; 2x UltraSparc II-450; 1GB RAM System : SunOS 5.8 Perl : 5.6.1 Gtk : (not installed) Tk : 800.023 Event : 0.81 IO::Pty : 0.01 All tests successful, 1 test skipped. Files=26, Tests=570, 88 wallclock secs (17.99 cusr + 1.33 csys = 19.32 CPU) ** POE 0.1501 on Mac OS X (Jotham) Hardware: G4-400 System : Mac OS X 10.0.4 Perl : 5.6.1 Gtk : (not installed) Tk : (not installed) Event : (not installed) IO::Pty : (not installed) (unknown test status) Files=26, Tests=444, 74 wallclock secs (20.47 cusr + 3.22 csys = 23.69 CPU) ** POE 0.15 on Windows 4.10.2222 (also dynweb) Hardware: (unknown) System : Windows 98 2nd Edition Perl : v5.6.1, MSWin32-x86-multi-thread, ActiveState build 628 Gtk : (not installed) Tk : (not installed) Event : (not installed) IO::Pty : (not installed) 7 tests skipped. Failed 6/26 test scripts, 76.92% okay. 45/297 subtests failed, 84.85% okay. [NB: Several of these test failures have been addressed, if not fixed.] ** POE 0.1401 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=26, Tests=459, 81 wallclock secs (17.16 cusr + 0.96 csys = 18.12 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) ------------- Test Coverage ------------- While the test coverage numbers are statistically meaningless, they still present a fun challenge and some measure of assurance that the authors care about POE's quality. Here's your grain of salt. Lime and tequila will be provided upon request. :) The "Ran" and "Total" numbers are breakpoints that perl's debugger can step through. The "Covered" number is the percentage of breakpoints that were actually stepped through during testing. These results are for version 0.1502. Source File = Ran / Total = Covered POE.pm = 23 / 24 = 95.83% POE/Component.pm = 5 / 5 = 100.00% POE/Component/Server/TCP.pm = 32 / 32 = 100.00% POE/Driver.pm = 5 / 5 = 100.00% POE/Driver/SysRW.pm = 47 / 54 = 87.04% POE/Filter.pm = 5 / 5 = 100.00% POE/Filter/Block.pm = 51 / 51 = 100.00% POE/Filter/Grep.pm = 24 / 31 = 77.42% POE/Filter/HTTPD.pm = 18 / 88 = 20.45% POE/Filter/Line.pm = 86 / 114 = 75.44% POE/Filter/Map.pm = 22 / 29 = 75.86% POE/Filter/RecordBlock.pm = 24 / 48 = 50.00% POE/Filter/Reference.pm = 81 / 84 = 96.43% POE/Filter/Stackable.pm = 31 / 40 = 77.50% POE/Filter/Stream.pm = 21 / 21 = 100.00% POE/Kernel.p.pm = 1 / 1 = 100.00% POE/Kernel.pm = 869 / 1121 = 77.52% POE/Kernel/Event.pm = 1 / 9 = 11.11% POE/Kernel/Gtk.pm = 2 / 17 = 11.76% POE/Kernel/Select.pm = 6 / 12 = 50.00% POE/Kernel/Tk.pm = 2 / 19 = 10.53% POE/NFA.pm = 114 / 203 = 56.16% POE/Pipe.pm = 44 / 60 = 73.33% POE/Pipe/OneWay.pm = 18 / 37 = 48.65% POE/Pipe/TwoWay.pm = 21 / 42 = 50.00% POE/Preprocessor.pm = 108 / 186 = 58.06% POE/Session.pm = 177 / 226 = 78.32% POE/Wheel.pm = 11 / 11 = 100.00% POE/Wheel/FollowTail.pm = 90 / 108 = 83.33% POE/Wheel/ListenAccept.pm = 51 / 65 = 78.46% POE/Wheel/ReadWrite.pm = 152 / 228 = 66.67% POE/Wheel/Run.pm = 176 / 250 = 70.40% POE/Wheel/SocketFactory.pm = 206 / 249 = 82.73% All Told = 2524 / 3475 = 72.63% Thanks for reading! -- Rocco Caputo / troc@netrus.net / poe.perl.org / poe.sourceforge.net