NAME

Zoidberg - a modular perl shell

SYNOPSIS

FIXME

DESCRIPTION

This is devel documentation, if you're looking for user documentation start with man page zoid(1)

This class provides an event and plugin engine.

FIXME more verbose description

METHODS

Some methods:

new()

Simple constructor

init(%attr)

Initialize secondary objects and sets config. %attr is merged with %{$self} and is ment for runtime variables. System config should not be set here, but in Zoidberg::Config.

main_loop()

Spans interactive shell reading from secondary object 'Buffer' or from STDIN. To quit this loop the routine exit() of this package should be called.

list_objects()

List secondary objects. These do not need to be loaded allready, the list is based on the config files.

object($zoidname)

Returns secondary object stored under $zoidname. The first time this will "autoload" the object's packages and initialise it.

test_object($zoidname, $class)

Returns true if object $zoidname exists and is blessed as $class. Since this calls object($zoidname) the object will be initialised when tested.

print($ding, $type, $options)

DEPRECATED - in time this will be moved to a package Zoidberg::Output

Use this in secondary objects and plugins.

Fancy print function -- used by plugins to print instead of perl function "print". It uses Data::Dumper for complex data

$ding can be ref or string of any kind $type can be any string and is optional. Common types: "debug", "message", "warning" and "error". $type also can be an ansi color. $options is an string containing chars as option switches.

n : put no newline after string
m : force markup
s : data is ref to array of arrays of scalars -- think sql records

ask($question)

DEPRECATED - in time this will be moved to a package Zoidberg::Output

Prompts $question to user and returns answer

reload($class)

Re-read the source file for class $class. This can be used to upgrade packages on runtime. This might cause real nasty bugs when versions are incompatible.

rehash_plugins()

Re-read config files for plugins and cache the contents. This is needed after adding a new plugin config file. When changing plugins it might not always be a "seamless upgrade".

init_object($zoidname)

Initialise a secundary object or plugin by the name of $zoidname. This is used to autoload plugins. The plugin's meta data is taken from the (cached) configuration file in the plugins dir by the same name (and the extension ".pd").

exit()

Called by plugins exit zoidberg -- this ends a interactive main_loop() loop

round_up()

This method should be called before letting the object being destroyed, it allows secundairy objects to be cleaned up nicely. If this is forgotten, DESTROY will try to do this for you but an error will be printed to STDERR. From here all secundairy objects having a round_up() method will be called recursively.

AUTHOR

Jaap Karssenberg || Pardus [Larus] <j.g.karssenberg@student.utwente.nl>

R.L. Zwart, <carl0s@users.sourceforge.net>

Copyright (c) 2002 Jaap G Karssenberg. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

See http://www.perl.com/language/misc/Artistic.html

SEE ALSO

perl, http://zoidberg.sourceforge.net