Weather-Com version 0.4_pre2
=============================

Introduction:
--------------
Weather-Com is meant to be a module suite enabling the perl programmer
to access weather information as provided by weather.com's XOAP
interface.

I've tried to use Weather::Underground for some time but soon I found
out that 'www.wunderground.com' does not provide much information about
locations outside the US. I am german, hence, I had to look for a
site providing international weather information - at least for the
cities I usually work or live at.

After surfing around for some time a friend of mine mentioned a
PHP package (or whatever they call what we call 'module' or 'package')
that accesses weather.com. I visited the weather.com site and found 
an SDK providing detailed information on their mixture of an 
HTTP-GET/XMLResponse API (http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html).
 
They provide lots of information - not only the current conditions 
like Weather::Underground does, but also up to 10 days of forecast 
containing most information one could need, e.g. the time of sunrise 
and sunset, the longitude and latitude of the location, data precompiled 
either in the US system or in the metric system, etc. 

To use this module you have to register first at weather.com
(http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html), but's for free.
You'll be send a mail containing your 'partner id', a license key
and a link where to download the SDK which includes the 
application developement guide, logos from weather.com and weather icons 
in three different sizes (as .png) to be able to show not only the facts 
and figures of the weather data you read.

Components of this module:
--------------------------
This module consists of several parts:

1. Weather::Com::Base   - the low level API
2. Weather::Com::Cached - implements the caching rules from weather.com
3. Weather::Com::Simple - high level wrapper around the API providing the
                          same interace as Weather::Underground
4. Weather::Com::Finder - The entrance point to the new, more feature rich
                          high level interface.
5. weather.pl           - a sample console program using Weather::Com::Simple
6. weather_ext.pl       - a sample console program using the new high level 
                          interface

Usually you should always use one of the high level interfaces as parsing
the hash structure returned by Weather::Com::Base and Weather::Com::Cached
is not self-explanatory.

If you plan to use the low level interface directly, please use 
Weather::Com::Cached instead of Weather::Com::Base to be sure to 
have the right caching rules implemented. You should only use 
Weather::Com::Base directly, if you plan to implement other caching 
mechanisms, e.g. a database driven one instead of the file- and 
'Storable-' based one that is used in Weather::Com::Cached.

If you want to implement another caching package for Weather::Com
please contact the author of this module and tell him... There's no
need to to the same work twice. Same applies for other packages to
be build around the above ones.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test		# tests will fail if you are 
   					# not connected to the internet
   make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires these other modules and libraries:

  - LWP::UserAgent
  - Storable
  - Time::Local
  - Time::Format
  - XML::Simple
  - URI::Escape

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE

Copyright (C) 2004-2005 by Thomas Schnuecker (thomas@schnuecker.de)

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.

The data provided by weather.com and made accessible by this OO
interface can be used for free under special terms. 

Please register at http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html, download
the SDK and have a look at the application programming guide for further
information about legal issues.


