[Nagiosplug-devel] Last call for Perl-plugin-objects

[Stanley Hopcroft]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,

(To the tune of 'One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer'

'
One perfdata, one XMLoutput, and one checker 
One perfdata, one XMLoutput, and one checker 
Hey mister plugin tender come here 
I want a Perl object and I want it now
'
)

Some time ago now, Mr Howard Wilkerson, proposed an object basis for the
Perl plugins and then performed a heculanean task in modifying many if
not all of the standard and contrib plugins to use his Classes.

FWIW, I am now almost convinced of the usefulness of this approach 
because it allows maintainers to add useful functions^H^H^H^H methods to   
the base class to equip the plugin with
   
. instrumentation - perf data capture perhaps
   
. standard debugging ??
   
. output options - yes XML output, or more likely Locale/Nat Language   
support    

. unified test support (a common test harness for all plugins).
   
without cost (or much) to the plugin author and allowing the maintainers
to deal with what amounts to a more useful implementation of
utils.pm, _instead_ of modifying each and every plugin
(perl -i.bak -pe 's/foo/bar' only takes one so far) to support these
functions.

As the various advocates of this approach say, it makes life easier for
authors by requiring them to only 

. write a function that checks the service

. set various attributes corresponding to mandatory and not-required
options with their edit checks (personally I can live without edit
checks), help and so on.

without having to do option processing and the rest of a plugin program.

If this is a bad idea, please let me know why.

Yours sincerely.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Stanley Hopcroft
------------------------------------------------------------------------

'...No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes
me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...'

from Meditation 17, J Donne.