WWW::CNic

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
INSTALLATION
PREREQUISITES
USAGE
CONSTRUCTOR
METHODS
COPYRIGHT
SEE ALSO

NAME

WWW::CNic - a web-based API for the CentralNic domain registry system.

SYNOPSIS

 	use WWW::CNic;

        my @suffixlist = qw(uk.com us.com de.com eu.com);

        my $query = WWW::CNic->new(command => 'search', 'domain' => 'example');

        $query->set(suffixlist => \@suffixlist);

        my $response = $query->execute;

        if ($response->is_error) {
                printf("Error: %s\n", $response->error);

        } else {
                foreach my $suffix(@suffixlist) {
                        if ($response->is_registered) {
                                printf("Domain %s.%s is registered to %s\n", $domain, $suffix, $response->registrant($suffix));

                        } else {
                                printf("Domain %s.%s is available for registration\n", $domain, $suffix);

                        }
                }
        }

DESCRIPTION

WWW::CNic provides a powerful object-oriented Perl interface to the CentralNic Toolkit system.

The design of WWW::CNic is inspired greatly by LWP, which is a prerequisite. Essentially, making a transaction requires building a request object, which is then executed and returns a response object. While each transaction type (search, registration, modification...) requires a different set of data to be sent by the client, all the response objects have common properties, inherited from the WWW::CNic::Response base class, with just a few extra methods for accessing specific information.

INSTALLATION

Installing WWW::CNic is as simple as:

        cd /usr/src
        wget http://toolkit.centralnic.com/dist/WWW-CNic-x.xx.tar.gz
        tar zxvf WWW-CNic-x.xx.tar.gz
        cd WWW-CNic-x.xx
        perl Makefile.PL
        make
        make install

PREREQUISITES

LWP - the WWW Library for Perl. This in turn requires libnet, URI and HTML::Parser.

An SSL toolkit (Crypt::SSLeay, IO::Socket::SSL) for doing HTTPS transactions.

Digest::MD5 is needed for hashing passwords.

USAGE

Consult the WWW::CNic::Cookbook manpage for detailed information on using WWW::CNic.

CONSTRUCTOR

 	my $query = WWW::CNic->new( [OPTIONS] );

The constructor for this class accepts the following options:

username - only needed for doing domain registrations and modifications. This is the User ID of your Registrar Handle.

password - the password for your Registrar Handle.

use_ssl - when set to 1, causes all transactions to take place over a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection. This is highly recommended for domain registration and modification transactions, although it's probably not needed for the other commands. In order to take advantage of this you need to have either the Crypt::SSLeay or IO::Socket::SSL modules installed. More information is available in the lwpcook manpage.

command - required for every transaction. This is a scalar containing the command name. The list of allowed commands is always growing, you should consult the Toolkit website for a complete list.

domain - only needed for domain registrations, modifications and other commands that act upon domains.

host - allows you to use to a non-standard host. This is mainly useful for client debugging purposes.

test - when set to 1, this causes any domain registration and modification transactions to use the test database. Again, this is useful for testing and debugging.

keep_alive - by default, WWW::CNic will use LWP::ConnCache to cache server connections. Setting keep_alive to 0 or undef will turn this off.

METHODS

 	$query->set( NAME => VALUE );

This method allows you to set any number of parameters prior to executing the query. The specifics of what parameters are required for what type of transaction is explained in the WWW::CNic::Cookbook manpage.

 	my $response = $query->execute();

This method makes the transaction and returns an instance of a WWW::CNic::Response child class.