Monks,

I have a project at work where I have to rewrite a network monitoring utility. Currently we are using vanilla IO::Socket stuff on both ends with a simple accept/forking server. What I want to do is implement something more along the lines of non-forking with select and non-blocking io on the server. So I'm thinking that POE will be useful for that on the server side. On the client side, I will have to deal with limited availability of a coherrent Perl install so I most likely would be using Perl2exe to solve that. But of course the client is really also a server so I would use POE or SOAP for that as well.

Most of the data that gets passed back and forth between the client and server ends up being perl data structures in the end anyway so I was also thinking something along the lines of XML-RPC or, more specifically, SOAP::Lite. But SOAP::Lite seems to be not very popular these days. There is also this but I don't know. If I don't use SOAP then I would still be passing XML docs back and forth between the client and server unless I find some other way to serialize the data (for which POE seems to be capable of here).

So I'm basically just looking for some general pointers as to whether SOAP or POE or something else that I am totally missing would be the right way to go.

By the way, the network monitoring goes something along the lines of:

server: Tell me who is logged in.
client: Here is a list of logged in users.
server: Give me 'uptime'.
client: Here you go.
server: Show me your mounted filesystems.
client: Here.
server: Run this command or block of code.
client: Ran it.

etc...

Thanks for reading.

In reply to POE vs. SOAP by braswell

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