Beginning Perl Web Development: From Novice to Professional introduces you to the world of Perl Internet application development. This book tackles all areas crucial to developing your first web applications and includes a powerful combination of real-world examples coupled with advice.
Topics range from serving and consuming RSS feeds, to monitoring Internet servers, to interfacing with e-mail. You’ll learn how to use Perl with ancillary packages like Mason and Nagios. Though not version specific, this book is an ideal read if you have had some grounding in Perl basics and now want to move into the world of web application development.
Author Steve Suehring emphasizes the security implications of Perl, drawing on years of experience teaching readers how to “think safe,” avoid common pitfalls, and produce well-planned, secure code.
RSS (an abbreviation for Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary) is used to syndicate content from a web site. RSS is helpful for gathering headlines and other news-related items from web sites or getting recent changes to a web page. It’s common for an end user to use news aggregation software to consume RSS feeds. Web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox also enable RSS feeds to be used as bookmarks.
Various Perl modules handle RSS feeds. Some of the modules, such as XML::RSS, are general and designed to work with most any RSS feed; others are specific to a particular site’s RSS feed. For example, XML::RSS::Headline::PerlJobs gets the headlines from jobs.perl.org, and XML::RSS::Headline::Fark gets headlines from the popular Fark web site.
This chapter looks at RSS from a Perl perspective. Specifically, you’ll see how to consume and create RSS feeds using the XML::RSS module.