Programming Jabber

Perl

The recipes have been built and tested with Perl 5.6.0, although earlier and later versions of release 5 will probably work just fine.

Two libraries are available for programming Jabber solutions in Perl. Both come in the form of installable modules and are of the object-oriented persuasion.

Net::Jabber

This module is available on the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), at http://www.cpan.org. Net::Jabber provides basic functionality for connecting to and interacting with a Jabber server, in addition to a host of higher-level features for manipulating all of the Jabber elements and making use of standard and custom namespaces.

It relies upon a companion module XML::Stream, also available on CPAN, that provides the underlying mechanisms for creating connections to a Jabber server, as well as sending, receiving, and interpreting (parsing) the fragments of conversation between your script and that Jabber server.

The version of Net::Jabber used in this book is 1.0022. The corresponding version of XML::Stream used is 1.12.

Jabber::Connection

The Jabber::Connection module is available on CPAN and provides the same basic features Net::Jabber does, albeit in a more “RISC” (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) way. While it provides similar functionality for connecting to and exchanging data with a Jabber server, it offers, via a companion modulecalled Jabber::NodeFactory, a lower-level API—similar to that in the Jabber server itself—for constructing and manipulating ...