=for advent_year 2010 =for advent_day 16 =for advent_title 'Net stockings are barely servicable gift receptacles =for advent_author Stephen R. Scaffidi Santa needed to implement a server to collect naughty/nice lists from all over the world. The IT elves needed a quick solution that allowed Naughty Montoring Service offices in far flung corners across the globe to report their extensive child behavioral data to HQ for analysis. In the end the North Pole settled on M, a comprehensive, flexible, and robust framework used by numerous other packages such as Catalyst::Engine::Server and Starman. It handles the gritty details of listening on one or more sockets, forking and daemonising, buffering, logging and even more. In some cases it takes more control of things than you might want (like signal handling), but before you give-up and roll your own, ask yourself: Do you B need your server to be an ornament polish and a gingerbread house spackle? M has extensive documentation, but our example script below should hopefully provide a comparatively short introduction. =sourcedcode mod16.pl =cut