Network Programming with Perl

A Generic Nonblocking I/O Module

The IO::Getline module solves the problem of mixing select() with line-oriented I/O, but it doesn't help with the other problems of nonblocking I/O, such as partial writes. In this section we develop a more general solution to the problem of nonblocking I/O. The two modules developed here are called IO::SessionSet and IO::SessionData. The IO::SessionData class is a wrapper around an IO::Socket and has read() and write() methods that use IO::Socket syntax. However, the class enhances the basic socket by knowing how to manage partial writes and the EWOULDBLOCK error message.

The IO::SessionSet class is analogous to IO::Select. It manages multiple IO::SessionData objects and allows you to multiplex among them. In ...