Monks,

UPS - the United Parcel Service - is certainly a big player in the package-shipping industry.

I was just writing up a blog entry about the various Perl/UPS modules that can be found on CPAN when I discovered that they are all either broken, abandoned or otherwise simply don't work.

The distributions I looked at are:

• Business::UPS
  Tracks packages but does not do rate requests. The "test suite" barely tests anything. Also the author, Justin Wheeler, does not receive email from his CPAN email address, cpan@datademons.com
  
  
• Webservice::UPS
  Tracks packages but does not do rate requests. This module is brand new and it appears that the test suite is still maturing.
  
  
• Business::Shipping::UPS_XML
  Written by Duane Hinkley of Down Home Web Design this module appears to work, though it will not install without a force install. Also, rather than giving the full set of results from UPS (shipping-method + rate) you are forced to make a different request for each possible rate. Since you can't ship UPS Ground from Hawaii to Florida, and you can't ship Next Day Air across town, we should have a way to get a list of Possible services along with the cost for each of them.
  
  
• Business::Shipping
  Will not install without force. My testing showed that it breaks with some strange errors about shipping to Australia (even though I was trying to ship from Denver to Los Angeles). This module also appears to be abandoned, as its author Dan Browning no longer appears to have an active email account at dan.browning@kavod.com.

Obviously this is a problem. Kyle Brandt has just released Webservice::UPS - written on Mouse - but in need of more tests and more functionality.

The documentation from UPS is sparse at best and from what I can tell, UPS does not appear to support any programming platforms released since 1999. Their "examples" include some Java code and some old Visual Basic. No .Net, no PHP, no Ruby, no Python and no Perl.

Does anyone here have a contact at UPS, or has anyone here written a UPS interface worth sharing?

Thanks!

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