Syndication::NewsML -- A NewsML library for Perl

NewsML is a standard format for the markup of multimedia news content, ratified by the International Press Telecommunications Council (http://www.iptc.org). According to the newsml.org website NewsML is "An XML-based standard to represent and manage news throughout its lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use."

NewsML differs from simpler standards such as RSS in that RSS sends links to stories, where NewsML can be used to send links or the story itself, plus any associated information such as images, video or audio files, PDF documents, or any other type of data.

NewsML also offers much more metadata information than RSS, including links between associated content; the ability to revoke, update or modify previously sent stories; support for sending the same story in multiple languages and/or formats; and a method for user-defined metadata known as Topic Sets.

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

You can find out more about NewsML at http://www.iptc.org/site/NewsML/ or http://www.newsml.org/

LATEST VERSION AND WHAT'S NEW

The latest version is 0.10, released 14 February 2002.

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

What's New:

v0.10 - Released to CPAN 14 Feb 2002

- internals: separated some classes out into NewsML/ directory

- getXXXList now returns a real array when called in an array context. NOTE this may break some code, notably function calls like myRoutine($newscomp->getNewsItemList) will now be passed an array rather than an array reference. Sorry bout that, but remember, this is pre-release software you're working with...

v0.09 - 13 Feb 2002 (unreleased)

- fixed bug that didn't allow multiple Party elements

- fixed bug: dies when asking for an attribute that doesn't exist

- greatly enhanced examples/NewsMLParser.pl

- added AFP example file

- added IPTC topic files (we don't use them yet, though)

v0.08 - Released to CPAN 16 Jan 2002

- one simple bugfix to make the test suite pass...

v0.07 - Released to CPAN 11 Jan 2002

- Added some generic methods to Syndication::NewsML::Node (and therefore all object classes):

o getXML -- return the current tag and all its children as an XML tree getContent -- same as above, but ignores the current container element (which means the resulting string may not be well-formed XML)

o getText updated to get text of all children (bug fix)

o getAllText -- return text in all child elements with no sanity checking, so you can even call this on the NewsML root element to retrieve all text in a document

  Thanks to Peter Hilbring for giving me the prodding required to get this
 done :-)

See the Changes file for previous releases.

INSTALLING Syndication::NewsML

The lazy way to install Syndication::NewsML:

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

Or the normal way:

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::NewsML 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::NewsML' the CPAN module should automagically install all of the prerequisites for you.

What Systems Does It Work With?

Syndication::NewsML 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::NewsML

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

GETTING HELP

The best place to ask questions now would be the NewsML mailing list at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newsml/, 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 NewsML documents obtained from the Net. You can find the test documents in the t/test_data/ directory.

I haven't written complete unit tests yet (after all there are 127 classes), so some methods remain untested. However the test documents include a fairly standard range of elements, so you should be able to get somewhere with the methods that work so far.

BUGS and TODO

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

At the moment, Syndication::NewsML only reads NewsML 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 0.8 2002/01/16 04:37:56 brendan Exp brendan $