Intended Audience:
Novice to intermediate Perl programmers who understand the basics of input and output, loops, regular expression matches, and the array and hash data types. A working familiarity with Perl5's object-oriented syntax is also recommended. You should understand the basics of networking, including the concepts of IP addresses, DNS names, and servers.

Description:
This tutorial will show you how to write robust client/server applications in Perl. We will begin with simple TCP-based clients that you can use to talk such standard services as FTP, Web, Mail and Net News. We will then turn to writing client/server applications from scratch, using as our examples applications that range from toys (a TCP-based psychotherapist server) to full-scale applications (an Internet chat system based on multicasting).

Topics covered include:

• Perl's low-level socket interface.
• The high-level IO::Socket, IO::Select and IO::Poll modules.
• Forward and reverse name resolution.
• The Net::FTP, Net::Telnet, Net::SMTP, LWP and MIME modules
• Choosing between TCP and UDP services.
• Choosing the right server architecture:
  • fork-and-select
  • multiplexed
  • multithreaded
  • preforked
• Advanced networking topics
  • broadcasting
  • multicasting
  • non-blocking I/O

After completing this tutorial, participants will understand how to build sophisticated client/server applications without leaving the power and convenience of the Perl programming language.