The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.
 / 
PNI-0.15
1 ++
/ PNI

NAME

PNI - Perl Node Interface

ATTENTION

This module was created to be used internally by a GUI, anyway you are free to use the scripting api if it does make sense.

SYNOPSIS

    use PNI ':-D'; # imports node, edge and task

    my $node = node 'Perlfunc::Print';
    $node->get_input('list')->set_data('Hello World !');
    $node->get_input('do_print')->set_data(1);

    task;

DESCRIPTION

Hi! I'm an italian mathematician. I really like Perl phylosophy as Larry jokes a lot even if he is one of the masters of hacking.

PNI stands for Perl Node Interface.

It is my main project, my contribution to the great Perl community. Node programming is really interesting since makes possible to realize a program even if you have no idea about programming.

Think about genetic researchers, for example. They need to focus on protein chains, not on what is a package. Maybe they can do an extra effort and say the world "variable" or "string" or even "regular expression" and that makes them proud, but they don't care about inheritance.

They want things working and they need Perl ... but if you say Strawberry they think about yogurt, not about Windows.

There are a lot of node programming languages (VVVV, Puredata, Max/Msp) but normally they target artists and interaction designers. I saw a lot of vjs and musicians do really complex programs with those software, and they never wrote a line of code.

This is my effort to provide a node interface that brings Perl power to people who don't know the Perl language.

Blah blah blah. ( this was the h2xs command :-)

METHODS

edge

Connects an output of a node to an input of another node.

    my $source_node = node 'Some::Node';

    my $target_node = node 'Another::Node';

    my $edge = edge 
      $source_node         => $target_node , 
      'source_output_name' => 'target_input_name';

This method delegates to PNI::Edge constructor.

node

Creates a node by its PNI type, that is the name of a package under the PNI::Node namespace. If you write

    my $node = node 'Some::Node';

PNI do the following steps:

1)

requires the PNI/Node/Some/Node.pm module.

2)

creates a new PNI::Node, assigns it an id and bless it as a PNI::Node::Some::Node.

3)

calls the init method as implemented in the PNI::Node::Some::Node package.

4)

adds the node to the root PNI::Scenario.

If no PNI type is passed, and you just write

    my $node = node;

PNI creates an empty node.

This method delegates to PNI::Node constructor.

node_list

    my @nodes = PNI::node_list;

Returns a list of available PNI nodes.

This method delegates to PNI::Finder nodes method.

task

Calls the task method for every loaded node. This method delegates to the root scenario task method.

loop

Starts the PNI main loop. It keeps calling task as fast as it can.

root

    my $root = PNI::root;

Returns the root PNI::Scenario.

SEE ALSO

PNI::Edge

PNI::Node

PNI::Scenario

AUTHOR

G. Casati , <fibo@cpan.org>

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2009-2011, Gianluca Casati

This program is free software, you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms of the Artistic License version 2.0 .