Net::XWhois 0.90 review

Net::XWhois is a Whois Client Interface for Perl5. SYNOPSIS use Net::XWhois; $whois = new Net::XWhois Domain => "vipul.net

License: Perl Artistic License File size: 17K Developer: Vipul Ved Prakash

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Net::XWhois is a Whois Client Interface for Perl5.

SYNOPSIS

use Net::XWhois;

$whois = new Net::XWhois Domain => "vipul.net" ;
$whois = new Net::XWhois Domain => "bit.ch",
Server => "domreg.nic.ch",
Retain => 1,
Parser => {
nameservers => 'nserver:s+(S+)',
};

The Net::XWhois class provides a generic client framework for doing Whois queries and parsing server response.

The class maintains an array of top level domains and whois servers associated with them. This allows the class to transparently serve requests for different tlds, selecting servers appropriate for the tld. The server details are, therefore, hidden from the user and "vipul.net" (from InterNIC), gov.ru (from RIPE) and "bit.ch" (from domreg.nic.ch) are queried in the same manner. This behaviour can be overridden by specifying different bindings at object construction or by registering associations with the class. See "register_associations()" and "new()".

One of the more important goals of this module is to enable the design of consistent and predictable interfaces to incompatible whois response formats. The Whois RFC (954) does not define a template for presenting server data; consequently there is a large variation in layout styles as well as content served across servers.

(There is, however, a new standard called RPSL (RFC2622) used by RIPE (http://www.ripe.net), the European main whois server.)

To overcome this, Net::XWhois maintains another set of tables - parsing rulesets - for a few, popular response formats. (See "%PARSERS"). These parsing tables contain section names (labels) together with regular expressions that match the corresponding section text. The section text is accessed "via" labels which are available as data instance methods at runtime. By following a consistent nomenclature for labels, semantically related information encoded in different formats can be accessed with the same methods.

Requirements:
Perl