NAME ThreatNet::Message - An object representation of a ThreatNet channel message DESCRIPTION ThreatNet is an evolving idea. It's homepage at time of publishing is This module is an abstract base class for a ThreatNet channel message, and allows you to create objects representing threat messages in a channel. ThreatNet itself is not yet available and this module has been uploaded seperately so people working on ThreatNet can play with the various compenents in different ways before we come to a decision about what collection of modules will be included in a core ThreatNet.pm package. METHODS new $message The "new" constructor takes a string containing the actual channel message and creates a new object. Please be aware that this method is likely to be heavily overloaded, so there may be additional requirements. This base class is extremely flexible and makes absolutely no requirements on the content of the message, even that is has length. For an example of a potentially more useful Message class, see ThreatNet::Message::GenericIPv4 Returns a "ThreatNet::Message" object on success, false if the message is not a valid message for a particular message class, or "undef" on error, such as being passed a non-string. message For any "ThreatNet::Messsage" class, the "message" accessor will always return the message in string form, although it may have been canonicalised and might not be identical to the original string. created The "created" method returns the unix epoch time that the "ThreatNet::Message" object was created (on the machine on which the object was created). For some situations, this will be sufficient for use as the time at which the event occured. Please be aware however, that it is "not" the time at which the event actually occured. Some protocols may supply the actual event time independantly. Returns the unix epoch time in seconds as an integer. event_time The "event_time" method returns the event time, or as close an estimate as the object is capable of providing. Unless the "ThreatNet::Message" class is actually aware of the true event time, it will generally estimate using the object creation time. Returns the unix epoch time in seconds as an integer. SUPPORT All bugs should be filed via the bug tracker at For other issues, or commercial enhancement and support, contact the author AUTHORS Adam Kennedy (Maintainer), , cpan@ali.as SEE ALSO , ThreatNet::Topic COPYRIGHT Copyright (c) 2004 - 2005 Adam Kennedy. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The full text of the license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.