NAME
    AnyEvent - provide framework for multiple event loops

    Event, Coro, Glib, Tk, Perl - various supported event loops

SYNOPSIS
       use AnyEvent;

       my $w = AnyEvent->io (fh => $fh, poll => "r|w", cb => sub {
          ...
       });

       my $w = AnyEvent->timer (after => $seconds, cb => sub {
          ...
       });

       my $w = AnyEvent->condvar; # stores wether a condition was flagged
       $w->wait; # enters "main loop" till $condvar gets ->broadcast
       $w->broadcast; # wake up current and all future wait's

DESCRIPTION
    AnyEvent provides an identical interface to multiple event loops. This
    allows module authors to utilise an event loop without forcing module
    users to use the same event loop (as only a single event loop can
    coexist peacefully at any one time).

    The interface itself is vaguely similar but not identical to the Event
    module.

    On the first call of any method, the module tries to detect the
    currently loaded event loop by probing wether any of the following
    modules is loaded: Coro::Event, Event, Glib, Tk. The first one found is
    used. If none is found, the module tries to load these modules in the
    order given. The first one that could be successfully loaded will be
    used. If still none could be found, AnyEvent will fall back to a
    pure-perl event loop, which is also not very efficient.

    Because AnyEvent first checks for modules that are already loaded,
    loading an Event model explicitly before first using AnyEvent will
    likely make that model the default. For example:

       use Tk;
       use AnyEvent;

       # .. AnyEvent will likely default to Tk

    The pure-perl implementation of AnyEvent is called
    "AnyEvent::Impl::Perl". Like other event modules you can load it
    explicitly.

WATCHERS
    AnyEvent has the central concept of a *watcher*, which is an object that
    stores relevant data for each kind of event you are waiting for, such as
    the callback to call, the filehandle to watch, etc.

    These watchers are normal Perl objects with normal Perl lifetime. After
    creating a watcher it will immediately "watch" for events and invoke the
    callback. To disable the watcher you have to destroy it (e.g. by setting
    the variable that stores it to "undef" or otherwise deleting all
    references to it).

    All watchers are created by calling a method on the "AnyEvent" class.

  IO WATCHERS
    You can create I/O watcher by calling the "AnyEvent->io" method with the
    following mandatory arguments:

    "fh" the Perl *filehandle* (not filedescriptor) to watch for events.
    "poll" must be a string that is either "r" or "w", that creates a
    watcher waiting for "r"eadable or "w"ritable events. "cb" teh callback
    to invoke everytime the filehandle becomes ready.

    Only one io watcher per "fh" and "poll" combination is allowed (i.e. on
    a socket you can have one r + one w, not any more (limitation comes from
    Tk - if you are sure you are not using Tk this limitation is gone).

    Filehandles will be kept alive, so as long as the watcher exists, the
    filehandle exists, too.

    Example:

       # wait for readability of STDIN, then read a line and disable the watcher
       my $w; $w = AnyEvent->io (fh => \*STDIN, poll => 'r', cb => sub {
          chomp (my $input = <STDIN>);
          warn "read: $input\n";
          undef $w;
       });

  TIME WATCHERS
    You can create a time watcher by calling the "AnyEvent->timer" method
    with the following mandatory arguments:

    "after" after how many seconds (fractions are supported) should the
    timer activate. "cb" the callback to invoke.

    The timer callback will be invoked at most once: if you want a repeating
    timer you have to create a new watcher (this is a limitation by both Tk
    and Glib).

    Example:

       # fire an event after 7.7 seconds
       my $w = AnyEvent->timer (after => 7.7, cb => sub {
          warn "timeout\n";
       });

       # to cancel the timer:
       undef $w

  CONDITION WATCHERS
    Condition watchers can be created by calling the "AnyEvent->condvar"
    method without any arguments.

    A condition watcher watches for a condition - precisely that the
    "->broadcast" method has been called.

    The watcher has only two methods:

    $cv->wait
        Wait (blocking if necessary) until the "->broadcast" method has been
        called on c<$cv>, while servicing other watchers normally.

        Not all event models support a blocking wait - some die in that
        case, so if you are using this from a module, never require a
        blocking wait, but let the caller decide wether the call will block
        or not (for example, by coupling condition variables with some kind
        of request results and supporting callbacks so the caller knows that
        getting the result will not block, while still suppporting blockign
        waits if the caller so desires).

        You can only wait once on a condition - additional calls will return
        immediately.

    $cv->broadcast
        Flag the condition as ready - a running "->wait" and all further
        calls to "wait" will return after this method has been called. If
        nobody is waiting the broadcast will be remembered..

        Example:

           # wait till the result is ready
           my $result_ready = AnyEvent->condvar;

           # do something such as adding a timer
           # or socket watcher the calls $result_ready->broadcast
           # when the "result" is ready.

           $result_ready->wait;

  SIGNAL WATCHERS
    You can listen for signals using a signal watcher, "signal" is the
    signal *name* without any "SIG" prefix. Multiple signals events can be
    clumped together into one callback invocation, and callback invocation
    might or might not be asynchronous.

    These watchers might use %SIG, so programs overwriting those signals
    directly will likely not work correctly.

    Example: exit on SIGINT

       my $w = AnyEvent->signal (signal => "INT", cb => sub { exit 1 });

  CHILD PROCESS WATCHERS
    You can also listen for the status of a child process specified by the
    "pid" argument (or any child if the pid argument is 0). The watcher will
    trigger as often as status change for the child are received. This works
    by installing a signal handler for "SIGCHLD". The callback will be
    called with the pid and exit status (as returned by waitpid).

    Example: wait for pid 1333

      my $w = AnyEvent->child (pid => 1333, cb => sub { warn "exit status $?" });

GLOBALS
    $AnyEvent::MODEL
        Contains "undef" until the first watcher is being created. Then it
        contains the event model that is being used, which is the name of
        the Perl class implementing the model. This class is usually one of
        the "AnyEvent::Impl:xxx" modules, but can be any other class in the
        case AnyEvent has been extended at runtime (e.g. in *rxvt-unicode*).

        The known classes so far are:

           AnyEvent::Impl::CoroEV    based on Coro::EV, best choice.
           AnyEvent::Impl::EV        based on EV (an interface to libev, also best choice).
           AnyEvent::Impl::Coro      based on Coro::Event, second best choice.
           AnyEvent::Impl::Event     based on Event, also second best choice :)
           AnyEvent::Impl::Glib      based on Glib, second-best choice.
           AnyEvent::Impl::Tk        based on Tk, very bad choice.
           AnyEvent::Impl::Perl      pure-perl implementation, inefficient.

    AnyEvent::detect
        Returns $AnyEvent::MODEL, forcing autodetection of the event model
        if necessary. You should only call this function right before you
        would have created an AnyEvent watcher anyway, that is, very late at
        runtime.

WHAT TO DO IN A MODULE
    As a module author, you should "use AnyEvent" and call AnyEvent methods
    freely, but you should not load a specific event module or rely on it.

    Be careful when you create watchers in the module body - Anyevent will
    decide which event module to use as soon as the first method is called,
    so by calling AnyEvent in your module body you force the user of your
    module to load the event module first.

WHAT TO DO IN THE MAIN PROGRAM
    There will always be a single main program - the only place that should
    dictate which event model to use.

    If it doesn't care, it can just "use AnyEvent" and use it itself, or not
    do anything special and let AnyEvent decide which implementation to
    chose.

    If the main program relies on a specific event model (for example, in
    Gtk2 programs you have to rely on either Glib or Glib::Event), you
    should load it before loading AnyEvent or any module that uses it,
    generally, as early as possible. The reason is that modules might create
    watchers when they are loaded, and AnyEvent will decide on the event
    model to use as soon as it creates watchers, and it might chose the
    wrong one unless you load the correct one yourself.

    You can chose to use a rather inefficient pure-perl implementation by
    loading the "AnyEvent::Impl::Perl" module, but letting AnyEvent chose is
    generally better.

SUPPLYING YOUR OWN EVENT MODEL INTERFACE
    If you need to support another event library which isn't directly
    supported by AnyEvent, you can supply your own interface to it by
    pushing, before the first watcher gets created, the package name of the
    event module and the package name of the interface to use onto
    @AnyEvent::REGISTRY. You can do that before and even without loading
    AnyEvent.

    Example:

       push @AnyEvent::REGISTRY, [urxvt => urxvt::anyevent::];

    This tells AnyEvent to (literally) use the "urxvt::anyevent::"
    package/class when it finds the "urxvt" package/module is loaded. When
    AnyEvent is loaded and asked to find a suitable event model, it will
    first check for the presence of urxvt.

    The class should provide implementations for all watcher types (see
    AnyEvent::Impl::Event (source code), AnyEvent::Impl::Glib (Source code)
    and so on for actual examples, use "perldoc -m AnyEvent::Impl::Glib" to
    see the sources).

    The above isn't fictitious, the *rxvt-unicode* (a.k.a. urxvt) uses the
    above line as-is. An interface isn't included in AnyEvent because it
    doesn't make sense outside the embedded interpreter inside
    *rxvt-unicode*, and it is updated and maintained as part of the
    *rxvt-unicode* distribution.

    *rxvt-unicode* also cheats a bit by not providing blocking access to
    condition variables: code blocking while waiting for a condition will
    "die". This still works with most modules/usages, and blocking calls
    must not be in an interactive application, so it makes sense.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
    The following environment variables are used by this module:

    "PERL_ANYEVENT_VERBOSE" when set to 2 or higher, reports which event
    model gets used.

EXAMPLE
    The following program uses an io watcher to read data from stdin, a
    timer to display a message once per second, and a condvar to exit the
    program when the user enters quit:

       use AnyEvent;

       my $cv = AnyEvent->condvar;

       my $io_watcher = AnyEvent->io (fh => \*STDIN, poll => 'r', cb => sub {
          warn "io event <$_[0]>\n";   # will always output <r>
          chomp (my $input = <STDIN>); # read a line
          warn "read: $input\n";       # output what has been read
          $cv->broadcast if $input =~ /^q/i; # quit program if /^q/i
       });

       my $time_watcher; # can only be used once

       sub new_timer {
          $timer = AnyEvent->timer (after => 1, cb => sub {
             warn "timeout\n"; # print 'timeout' about every second
             &new_timer; # and restart the time
          });
       }

       new_timer; # create first timer

       $cv->wait; # wait until user enters /^q/i

REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
    Consider the Net::FCP module. It features (among others) the following
    API calls, which are to freenet what HTTP GET requests are to http:

       my $data = $fcp->client_get ($url); # blocks

       my $transaction = $fcp->txn_client_get ($url); # does not block
       $transaction->cb ( sub { ... } ); # set optional result callback
       my $data = $transaction->result; # possibly blocks

    The "client_get" method works like "LWP::Simple::get": it requests the
    given URL and waits till the data has arrived. It is defined to be:

       sub client_get { $_[0]->txn_client_get ($_[1])->result }

    And in fact is automatically generated. This is the blocking API of
    Net::FCP, and it works as simple as in any other, similar, module.

    More complicated is "txn_client_get": It only creates a transaction
    (completion, result, ...) object and initiates the transaction.

       my $txn = bless { }, Net::FCP::Txn::;

    It also creates a condition variable that is used to signal the
    completion of the request:

       $txn->{finished} = AnyAvent->condvar;

    It then creates a socket in non-blocking mode.

       socket $txn->{fh}, ...;
       fcntl $txn->{fh}, F_SETFL, O_NONBLOCK;
       connect $txn->{fh}, ...
          and !$!{EWOULDBLOCK}
          and !$!{EINPROGRESS}
          and Carp::croak "unable to connect: $!\n";

    Then it creates a write-watcher which gets called whenever an error
    occurs or the connection succeeds:

       $txn->{w} = AnyEvent->io (fh => $txn->{fh}, poll => 'w', cb => sub { $txn->fh_ready_w });

    And returns this transaction object. The "fh_ready_w" callback gets
    called as soon as the event loop detects that the socket is ready for
    writing.

    The "fh_ready_w" method makes the socket blocking again, writes the
    request data and replaces the watcher by a read watcher (waiting for
    reply data). The actual code is more complicated, but that doesn't
    matter for this example:

       fcntl $txn->{fh}, F_SETFL, 0;
       syswrite $txn->{fh}, $txn->{request}
          or die "connection or write error";
       $txn->{w} = AnyEvent->io (fh => $txn->{fh}, poll => 'r', cb => sub { $txn->fh_ready_r });

    Again, "fh_ready_r" waits till all data has arrived, and then stores the
    result and signals any possible waiters that the request ahs finished:

       sysread $txn->{fh}, $txn->{buf}, length $txn->{$buf};

       if (end-of-file or data complete) {
         $txn->{result} = $txn->{buf};
         $txn->{finished}->broadcast;
         $txb->{cb}->($txn) of $txn->{cb}; # also call callback
       }

    The "result" method, finally, just waits for the finished signal (if the
    request was already finished, it doesn't wait, of course, and returns
    the data:

       $txn->{finished}->wait;
       return $txn->{result};

    The actual code goes further and collects all errors ("die"s,
    exceptions) that occured during request processing. The "result" method
    detects wether an exception as thrown (it is stored inside the $txn
    object) and just throws the exception, which means connection errors and
    other problems get reported tot he code that tries to use the result,
    not in a random callback.

    All of this enables the following usage styles:

    1. Blocking:

       my $data = $fcp->client_get ($url);

    2. Blocking, but parallelizing:

       my @datas = map $_->result,
                      map $fcp->txn_client_get ($_),
                         @urls;

    Both blocking examples work without the module user having to know
    anything about events.

    3a. Event-based in a main program, using any support Event module:

       use Event;

       $fcp->txn_client_get ($url)->cb (sub {
          my $txn = shift;
          my $data = $txn->result;
          ...
       });

       Event::loop;

    3b. The module user could use AnyEvent, too:

       use AnyEvent;

       my $quit = AnyEvent->condvar;

       $fcp->txn_client_get ($url)->cb (sub {
          ...
          $quit->broadcast;
       });

       $quit->wait;

SEE ALSO
    Event modules: Coro::Event, Coro, Event, Glib::Event, Glib.

    Implementations: AnyEvent::Impl::Coro, AnyEvent::Impl::Event,
    AnyEvent::Impl::Glib, AnyEvent::Impl::Tk.

    Nontrivial usage example: Net::FCP.


