Using IMu's Perl Library

The IMu Perl API source code bundle for version 2.0 (or higher) is required to develop an IMu-based application. This bundle contains all the modules that make up the IMu Perl API. Contact Axiell Support for access to the IMu API bundles

To build Perl applications the source code bundle must be extracted on the server machine and the path to the source code specified in the PERL5LIB environment variable or as an argument to the lib module. For example, if the IMu API source code is installed in the directory /usr/local/lib/imu the following lines would be added to the Perl code:

use lib '/usr/local/lib/imu';use IMu;

Test Program

Compiling and running this very simple terminal based program is a good test of whether the development environment has been set up properly for using IMu:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use lib '/usr/local/lib/imu';
use IMu;

printf("IMu version %s\n", $IMu::VERSION);
exit(0);

The IMu.pm file defines a class called IMu. This class includes the member VERSION which contains the version of this IMu release.

Exceptions

Many of the methods in the IMu library objects throw an exception (die in Perl terminology) when an error occurs. For this reason, code that uses IMu library objects should be surrounded with an eval block.

The following code is a basic template for writing Perl programs that use the IMu library:

# ⋯
eval
{
    # Create and use IMu objects
    # ...
};
if ($@)
{
    # Handle or report error
    # ...
}

Most IMu exceptions throw an IMu::Exception object. In many cases your code can simply handle the $@ variable (as in this template). If more information is required about the IMu::Exception object thrown, see Exceptions.

Note: Many of the examples that follow assume that code fragments have been surrounded with code structured in this way.