NAME

Pod::POM::Web - HTML Perldoc server

DESCRIPTION

Pod::POM::Web is a Web application for browsing the documentation of Perl components installed on your local machine. Since pages are dynamically generated, they are always in sync with code actually installed.

The application offers

a tree view for browsing through installed modules (with dynamic expansion of branches as they are visited)
a tree view for navigating and opening / closing sections while visiting a documentation page
a source code view with hyperlinks between used modules and optionally with syntax coloring (see section "Optional features")
direct access to perlfunc entries (builtin Perl functions)
search through perlfaq headers
fulltext search, including names of Perl variables (this is an optional feature -- see section "Optional features").
parsing and display of version number
display if and when the displayed module entered Perl core.
parsing pod links and translating them into hypertext links
links to CPAN sites

The DHTML code for navigating through documentation trees requires a modern browser. So far it has been tested on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 2.0

USAGE

Usage is described in a separate document Pod::POM::Web::Help.

INSTALLATION

Starting the Web application

Once the code is installed (most probably through CPAN or CPANPLUS), you have to configure the web server :

As a mod_perl service

The recommended way to run this application is within a mod_perl environment. If you have Apache2 with mod_perl 2.0, then edit your perl.conf as follows :

  PerlModule Apache2::RequestRec
  PerlModule Apache2::RequestIO
  <Location /perldoc>
        SetHandler modperl
        PerlResponseHandler Pod::POM::Web->handler
  </Location>

Then navigate to URL http://localhost/perldoc.

As a cgi-bin script

Alternatively, you can run this application as a cgi-script by writing a simple file in your cgi-bin directory, like this :

  #!/path/to/perl
  use Pod::POM::Web;
  Pod::POM::Web->handler;

The same can be done for running under mod_perl Registry (write the same script as above and put it in your Apache/perl directory). However, this does not make much sense, because if you have mod_perl Registry then you could as well run it as a basic mod_perl handler.

As a standalone server

A third way to use this application is to start a process invoking the builtin HTTP server :

  perl -MPod::POM::Web -e "Pod::POM::Web->server"

This is useful if you have no other HTTP server, or if you want to run this module under the perl debugger.

Note about security

This application is intended as a power tool for Perl developers, not as an Internet application. It will display the documentation and source code of any module installed under your @INC path or Apache lib/perl directory, so it is probably a bad idea to put it on a public Internet server.

Optional features

Syntax coloring

Syntax coloring improves readability of code excerpts. If your Perl distribution is from ActiveState, then Pod::POM::Web will take advantage of the ActiveState::Scineplex module which is already installed on your system. Otherwise, you need to install PPI::HTML, available from CPAN.

Fulltext indexing

Pod::POM::Web can index the documentation and source code of all your installed modules, including Perl variable names, Names:::Of::Modules, etc. To use this feature you need to

install Search::Indexer from CPAN
build the index as described in Pod::POM::Web::Indexer documentation.

AnnoCPAN comments

The website http://annocpan.org/ lets people add comments to the documentation of CPAN modules. The AnnoCPAN database is freely downloadable and can be easily integrated with locally installed modules via runtime filtering.

If you want AnnoCPAN comments to show up in Pod::POM::Web, do the following:

install AnnoCPAN::Perldoc from CPAN;
download the database from http://annocpan.org/annopod.db and save it as $HOME/.annocpan.db (see the documentation in the above module for more details). You may also like to try AnnoCPAN::Perldoc::SyncDB which is a crontab-friendly tool for periodically downloading the AnnoCPAN database.

AUTHORING

Images

The Pod::Pom::Web server also serves non-pod files within the @INC hierarchy. This is useful for example to include images in your documentation, by inserting chunks of HTML as follows :

  =for html
    <img src="pretty_diagram.jpg">

  =for html
    <object type="image/svg+xml" data="try.svg" width="640" height="480">
    </object>

Here it is assumed that auxiliary files pretty_diagram.jpg or try.svg are in the same directory than the POD source; but of course relative or absolute links can be used.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This web application was deeply inspired by :

the structure of HTML Perl documentation released with ActivePerl (http://www.activeperl.com/ASPN/Perl).
the excellent tree navigation in Microsoft's former MSDN Library Web site -- since they rebuilt the site, keyboard navigation has gone !
the standalone HTTP server implemented in Pod::WebServer.
the wide possibilities of Andy Wardley's Pod::POM parser.

Thanks to BooK who mentioned a weakness in the API, to Chris Dolan who supplied many useful suggestions and patches (esp. integration with AnnoCPAN), to Rémi Pauchet who pointed out a regression bug with Firefox CSS, and to Alexandre Jousset who fixed a bug in the TOC display.

RELEASE NOTES

Indexed information since version 1.04 is not compatible with previous versions.

So if you upgraded from a previous version and want to use the index, you need to rebuild it entirely, by running the command :

  perl -MPod::POM::Web::Indexer -e "Pod::POM::Web::Indexer->new->index(-from_scratch => 1)"

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests to bug-pod-pom-web at rt.cpan.org, or through the web interface at http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/ReportBug.html?Queue=Pod-POM-Web. I will be notified, and then you'll automatically be notified of progress on your bug as I make changes.

AUTHOR

Laurent Dami, <laurent.d...@justice.ge.ch>

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

TODO

  - XUL error message for CSS
   - real tests !
  - checks and fallback solution for systems without perlfunc and perlfaq
  - factorization (esp. initial <head> in html pages)
  - use Getopts to choose colouring package, toggle CPAN, etc.
  - declare bugs 
      - SQL::Abstract, nonempty line #337
      - LWP: item without '*'
      - CPAN : C<CPAN::WAIT> in L<..> 
      - perlre : line 940, code <I ...> parsed as I<...>
      - =head1 NAME B<..> in Data::ShowTable

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