Programming Jabber

Using Demo::JBook as an Apache Handler

The Demo::JBook application is going to exist as an Apache mod_perl handler, that is, we’ll use the power of Perl’s integration into the Apache web server to write an Apache module in Perl. You can find out more about mod_perl at http://perl.apache.org.

Being a mod_perl module, Demo::JBook exists in the form of a Perl module and is configured in Apache to service calls to http://[ hostname ]/jbook. The configuration can be comfortably placed in the main Apache configuration file, httpd.conf, or, as is common in mod_perl installations, in an extra file usually called perl.conf, which is linked to httpd.conf as follows:

<IfModule mod_perl.c>
  Include conf/perl.conf
</IfModule>

The configuration for Demo::JBook is placed in the perl.conf file, as shown in Example 10-5.

Example 10-5. Configuring the module as a handler in Apache

require conf/startup.pl

...

<Location /jbook>
  SetHandler perl-script
  PerlHandler Demo::JBook
</Location>

The PerlHandler directive refers to the Demo::JBook module, which is the JBook.pm file that exists in the Demo/ directory. The module will be invoked to handle calls to the relative URL /jbook. You can add the location of the Demo::JBook module to mod_perl’s list of directories in the BEGIN section of the startup.pl script, in the conf/ directory, like this:

BEGIN {
  use Apache ();
  use lib '[the directory location of Demo::JBook]';
}