ANNOUNCEMENT: POE 0.31 Released

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Rejoice!
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POE 0.31 has been released.  Thanks go out to everyone who helped
develop it.

Highlights of changes since the last announcement:

Scheduled Deprecations:

- The new() constructor for POE::Session is finally being phased out.
This release kicks off the deprecation by documenting it.

- Signal deprecations are nearly complete.  Many aspects of signal
handling have been improved this time around, including SIGTSTP
(^Z), signal handler return values, SIGCHLD polling, and the
ability to handle SIGWINCH.

Improved Portability:

- POE::Wheel::Run has early support for ActiveState Perl systems.
Thank Merijn Broeren and Nick Williams for this one.

- Restructured POE's tests, multiplying the event loop tests by the
number of supported event loops.  This doesn't significantly
increase POE's test coverage, but it did flush out a lot of bugs.

Installer Improvements:

- Eliminated redundant network test prompts.

- Removed the old dependency checker.

New Features:

- POE::Wheel::FollowTail will watch files that don't exist.  It also
includes a tail() method for restarting where you left off.

- POE::Filter::HTTPD allows arbitrary request methods.  Martijn van
Beers also patched it to support writing keep-alive servers.

- Nick Williams gave POE::Component::Server::TCP a Hostname
constructor parameter.  The component also gained a Started
callback.

- Nick Williams almost completely rewrote POE::Wheel::ReadLine,
adding many of gnu readline's features: command history search,
custom key bindings, .inputrc parsing, tab completion, vi and emacs
modes, and more.

Bug Fixes:

- POE::Filter::Reference loads Compress::Zlib, and avoids a redundant
string eval() that was dragging down performance.  Thanks to Rhesa
Rozendaal, Philip Gwin, and others.

- POE::Wheel::ReadLine's hang problems have finally been determined.
Term::ReadKey has an obscure bug that manifests under Perl 5.8.0 on
certain Linux systems.  Upgrade Perl, or Linux, or both, and the
problem should go away.

- POE::Loop's loader uses a better hash of the event loop module's
name, making it easier for third-party loop authors to publish
their works.

As if that wasn't enough, POE's web site contains detailed logs for
every public release, ever!

- http://poe.perl.org/?POE_CHANGES

Even now the latest tarball should be hurtling towards your favorite
CPAN mirror.  It is also on the web, and so is a Windows PPD!  Users
who need advanced notice of changes can follow POE's development in
CVS or discuss new features on the mailing list.

- http://poe.perl.org/?Where_to_Get_POE
- http://poe.perl.org/?POE_Support_Resources

Thanks again to everyone who helped with this release.  Keep the
feedback and patches coming.

---------
About POE
---------

POE is a networking and multitasking framework for Perl.  It has been
in active development since 1996, and its first public release was in
1998.  O'Reilly's The Perl Conference (now part of OSCON) named it
"Best New Module" in 1999.

- http://poe.perl.org/?What_POE_Is

POE's users and developers continue to improve and build upon it.  See
the CPAN for the most up-to-date list of POE based modules.

- http://search.cpan.org/search?mode=module&query=POE

POE's robustness and performance have made it an integral part of
mission critical applications since its first release.  It is used in
several fields, and in projects ranging from just a few lines of code
to hundreds of thousands.

- Financial:
Market servers, clients, billing systems, and automated trading
agents.

- Web:
Commerce servers, content management systems, application servers,
data warehouses, WAP proxies, ad exchanges, web crawlers/spiders,
and a variety of specialized agents.

- System Administration:
Large-scale host monitors and maintenance agents, distributed load
testers, a distributed file system (InterMezzo), radius monitors,
system log managers and reports, SNMP monitors, and spam detectors.

- Entertainment:
Interactive TV servers; mp3 jukeboxes and streaming servers; game
server monitors, managers, and tournament controllers; and a
plethora of IRC applications, services, and agents (bots).

- Software Development:
Compile farm managers, build managers, distributed testing
frameworks.

- Monitoring and Automation:
X10 home control systems, weather station monitors, alarm monitors.

We look forward to hearing how POE has helped you.

--
Rocco Caputo - rcaputo@cpan.org - http://poe.perl.org/