flexfax: Request for notes: Net::Hylafax

[David Birnbaum <davidb@chelsea.net>]

Folks,

A few months ago, I posted a note about a Perl Hylafax module - well,
we've finally resumed serious development, and hope to have a version
released to the world shortly.

In our development, I wanted to describe our object model briefly and see
if anyone had any comments.  This is being written as a Net:: module, and
as a result, it inherits all of the methods of Net::FTP (see the docs for
info about that).

We've chosen to add on some additional object types that implement
higher-level Hylafax functionality, which will be available through the
connection.  One will be able to enter all of the raw Hylafax commands
via the normal FTP-like interface (except you don't have to use QUOT),
but with these extended objects, you can have a method interface to the 
whole thing.  I'm only using pseudocode at the moment, but here's our
thoughts so far:

Net::Hylafax::Job

  Representative of a schedule job, this will allow one to perform
  various job-related fuctions, such as:

  $job->status (get the status of the selected job)
  $job->cancel (cancel a job)
  $job->submit (submit a job)

  and so on.  the JPARM stuff is all accessable through this thing.

Net::Hylafax::JobGroup

  As with the Job, this is a utility to perform functions on a group of
  jobs.  It contains a number of Job objects, and (until the functionality
  is written into Hylafax) will do repetative stuff against a list of
  different Jobs that are part of a group.

Net::Hylafax::Document

  A convenience class for doing Gets and Puts of documents that are stored
  on the server, as well as attaching a document to a job that was
  created.  ie, something like this:

    $job = $hylafax->NewJob
    $doc = $hylafax->PutNewDocument( "/tmp/mypsfile" );
    print "Doc saved as ", $doc->ServerName, "\n";
    $job->Document( $doc );
    $job->Dial( "555-1212" );
    $job->Submit;

Net::Hylafax::Q

  A representation of the Q, this may be subclassed into SendQ, RecvQ,
  PollQ, etc.  It will allow one to set the format, list the Q, etc:

    $q = $hylafax->SendQ;
    $q->Format( $format );
    $q->List;

Net::Hylafax::Modem

  The modem object - will allow modems to be reset, enabled, as well as
  view the status of them:

    @modems = $hylfax->ListModems;
    foreach ( @modems ) {
        print "Modem status is: ", $_->Name, $_->Status, "\n";
    }

Any comments, suggestions, etc. would be appreciated as we get started on
this.

Pure OO people will probably point out that the Modem class really doesn't
inherit from the Net::Hylafax class; so, there may be another class
heirarchy that lives on this, implementing the HASA relationship instead
of the ISA relationship.

Thanks,

David.