/ 
Prim-0.01
/ client

NAME

client - an example client for Perl Remote Invocation of Methods (prim)

SYNOPSIS

Here is the code in this example script (for those using perldoc).

use Prim;

This object oriented module provides access to a function only server (objects will not come to you if you use Prim, try PrimObject instead).

my $usage = "./client [server]\n";

my $hello_obj = Prim->Prim_constructor('statserver.somecompany.com', shift);

To obtain access to your server call Prim_constructor. The arguments are the service name and an optional host name. If you include the host, Prim will attempt to contact the primd server on port 5368 on that host to obtain the port number. If you omit the host, or primd on the host fails to deliver a port, the local host is searched by looking /tmp/name.prim. See the Prim.pm source file for more information on how the search is currently done. See primd for how remote lookup requests are handled.

my @response;

@response  = $hello_obj->max(1, 8, 4);
print "@response\n";

@response  = $hello_obj->mode(1, 8, 8, 4, 2, 3, 4);
print "@response\n";

Once you have a Prim object, you can call functions in the server by calling them on your Prim object.

eval ( '@response  = $hello_obj->sum(1, 8, 4);');
if ($@) { print "error: $@\n"; }
else    { print "@response\n"; }

If you call a method which the server does not support, you will receive a fatal error. You can trap this in the usual way with eval.

my %response = $hello_obj->send_documentation(qw(mode max));

foreach (keys %response) {
  print "$_:\n" . $response{$_} . "\n";
}

If you want documentation, call send_documentation on your Prim object. If you name functions, you will receive documentation about only the ones you name. If you don't name any functions, you will receive documentation about all of them.

DESCRIPTION

The above script makes a Prim object by calling its funkily named constructor (the name is long since servers cannot use this name). The arguments taken from the command line are the name of the prim service and optionally the name of the computer on which it runs (eventually discovery methods may allow you to omit this argument and still use the service on a remote computer). The name can (and probably should) contain dots so that services with the same name can coexist. For instance, if the above service has a short name of statserver, it might be called statserver.somecompany.com so that other greeters don't conflict with it.

The server for this script is called server and is in this directory (if you haven't disturbed the distribution). Looking in that file we see that the sum function is not exposed to callers. Attempting to call it kills the caller. To trap such errors, wrap your call in an eval as shown.

Here is the output from running this script while the server is up:

8
8 4
error: 'sum' not supported for client.

This says that the maximum number in the list is 8, the modes are 8 and 4 and sum is not available.