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Syndication::NITF -- A NITF v3.0 library for Perl

Syndication::NITF is an object-oriented Perl interface to NITF documents, allowing you to manage (and one day create) NITF documents without any specialised NITF or XML knowledge.

NITF is a standard format for the markup of textual news content (eg newspaper and magazine articles), ratified by the International Press Telecommunications Council (http://www.iptc.org).

This module supports the version 3.0 DTD of NITF. It makes no attempt to support eariler versions of the DTD.

You can find out more about NITF at http://www.nitf.org/ or http://www.iptc.org/

LATEST VERSION AND WHAT'S NEW

The latest version is 0.02, released 19 December 2001.

Download: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/B/BQ/BQUINN/

What's New in 0.02:

  • Example Parser

    Simple example parser added that outputs information about an NITF file, handling most types of tag.

See the Changes file for previous releases.

INSTALLING Syndication::NITF

The simple way to install Syndication::NITF:

   $ perl -MCPAN -e shell
   cpan> install Syndication::NITF

Or you can do it by hand

Retrieve the latest copy from CPAN: http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/B/BQ/BQUINN/

   $ perl Makefile.PL # Creates the Makefile
   $ make             # Runs the makefile
   $ make test        # Optional (See Interopability below)
   $ make install     # Installs Syndication::NITF into  your Perl library location

With this method you will first have to install the pre-requisite module XML::DOM. See "what are the prerequisites?".

What Are The Prerequisites?

  • XML::DOM (Have not tested lower than v1.27)

  • Perl5 (Have not tested lower than v5.6)

To get the latest versions of the prerequisite module you can simply type this at the command prompt:

   $ perl -MCPAN -e shell
   cpan> install XML::DOM

or if you just 'install Syndication::NITF' the CPAN module should automagically install all of the prerequisites for you.

What Systems Does It Work With?

Syndication::NITF should work on any machine that supports XML::DOM, and any filesystem including Windows, although I haven't tested it on Windows yet. It's still early days, so expect some bugs.

WHERE ARE THE MANUALS?

Once you've installed, you can type:

   $ perldoc Syndication::NITF

Or you can view them starting from here: Syndication::NITF,

GETTING HELP

The best place to ask questions now would be the NITF mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nitf/, or ask me directly at brendan\@clueful.com.au. If there is enough demand we may start up a specialised list.

General Perl/XML questions should be asked on the Perl-XML mailing list, which you can find at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Browse/Threaded/perl-xml

THE TEST SUITE & INTEROPERABILITY

The standard make test test suite checks most elements in a small range of test NITF documents obtained from the Net. You can find the test documents in the t/test_data/ directory.

BUGS and TODO

There are probably bugs all over the place -- this is still an early version.

At the moment, Syndication::NITF only reads NITF files -- in the future it should be able to modify and write them as well.

See TODO for what I'm thinking of building and what would be nice to have.

AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT

This module is Copyright (C) 2001 by

        Brendan Quinn
        Clueful Consulting Pty Ltd
        GPO Box 2747EE
        Melbourne 3001
        Victoria, AUSTRALIA

All rights reserved.

This module is free software. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the same terms as Perl itself.

$Id: README.pod,v 0.2 2001/12/19 05:27:20 brendan Exp $