ANNOUNCE: Perl module Syndication::NewsML v0.04 released

[Brendan Quinn <brendan@clueful.com.au>]

Hi all,

You can download the NewsML Perl module from your friendly neighbourhood
CPAN at the following address:

ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/authors/id/B/BQ/BQUINN/Syndication-NewsML-0.04.tar.gz

Please note that the name has changed from News::NewsML -- the News::
prefix was clashing with some Usenet news modules on CPAN.

Here is an excerpt from the README:

Syndication::NewsML -- a NewsML library for Perl

Syndication::NewsML is an object-oriented Perl interface to NewsML
documents, allowing you to manage (and one day create) NewsML documents
without any specialised NewsML or XML knowledge.

NewsML is a standard format for the markup of multimedia news content,
ratified by the International Press Telecommunications Council
(http://www.iptc.org). According to the newsml.org website NewsML is "An
XML-based standard to represent and manage news throughout its
lifecycle, including production, interchange, and consumer use."

NewsML differs from simpler standards such as RSS in that RSS sends
links to stories, where NewsML can be used to send links or the story
itself, plus any associated information such as images, video or audio
files, PDF documents, or any other type of data.

NewsML also offers much more metadata information than RSS, including
links between associated content; the ability to revoke, update or
modify previously sent stories; support for sending the same story in
multiple languages and/or formats; and a method for user-defined
metadata known as Topic Sets.

You can find out more about NewsML at http://www.iptc.org/site/NewsML/
or http://www.newsml.org/

This module was inspired by the NewsML Toolkit, written in Java by David
Megginson (http://www.megginson.com)

What's New in 0.04:

  * Some TopicSet support

    TopicSet support includes the routines getElementByEuid and
    getElementByDuid, which are required to find internal references to
    TopicSets for a given element. Also includes findReference,
    resolveTopicSet and resolveTopicSetDescription methods, used to
    return the related topic set for further processing. See
    t/3_complex.t for a simple usage example.

  * Better date handling

    All date objects now have a method getDatePerl() which converts a
    ISO8601-style date (the NewsML standard) to a Perl timestamp in UTC,
    for use with localtime() etc.

  * Name change

    The module is now called Syndciation::NewsML rather than
    News::NewsML.

This module is a work in progress. I'm releasing it progressively as I
work on it to get help in finding and fixing bugs, suggestions for
improvements and new functionality, so that other people don't waste
their time trying to replicate my work, and because I generally think
that iterative development is a Good Thing.

As I make further changes I will continue to release new versions to
CPAN, so check my author directory. I won't make announcements to the
perl-xml and syndication lists for every minor release, but I may bug
the newsml list until they tell me to stop! So check there if you want
to be kept up to date.

Please try it out, and let me know if you have any suggestions for
improvements or you find problems.

Regards,

Brendan.
--
Brendan Quinn                                   brendan@clueful.com.au
Clueful Consulting Pty Ltd                       Phone +61 4 0076 0077
GPO Box 2747EE                          within Australia: 0400 760 077
Melbourne, Australia                http://www.clueful.com.au/brendan/