Updated Perl API for DBus

[Daniel P. Berrange]

I've done some further work on the Perl APIs I mentioned a few months
back. The previous low level APIs (equiv of Python dbus_bindings.pyx) 
are now in Net::DBus::Binding::* modules. Using these, I've created a
set of high level APIs (equiv of Python dbus.py) for application 
developers in Net::DBus::* modules - for ease of learning I'm trying
to keep the object & method names as close as possible to those in the
python bindings.

For a quick demo I've created Perl functional equivalents of the four 
python example programs, using the same object/service names. So the
Perl example-client ought to work with the Python example-service
and vica-verca. Likewise for the example-signal-emitter and the 
example-signal-recipient scripts.

The place where we divert from Python is with data typing. Since Perl
is a very loosely typed language, fields are added to messages as strings,
arrays or dictionaries. For interoperating with more strongly typed
languages, hints must be given about the data type to use. For example,
if a remote object had a 'getUser(id)' method which expected 'id' to be 
a uint32 then rather than just calling

   my $id = "123";
   $object->getUser($id);   # Encodes $id as a string

you'd have to do

   my $id = "123";
   $object->getUser(duint32($id));   # Encode $id as a uint32

When importing Net::DBus, it automatically provides these data type
hinting functions (dbool, dbyte, dint32, duint32, dfloat, dstring, etc).
Not ideal, but I'm can't think of anything better since Perl is weakly
typed and has no way of knowing what data types the remote method will
be expecting. If anyone's got other suggestions I'm open to them....

For those interested code is browsable as before from

  http://cvs.berrange.com/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/freeware/DBus/

While experimental RPMs (& soon Debian packages) are on my nightly 
builder

  http://autobuild.berrange.com/~builder/

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
|=-       Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-           Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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