Perl 'Expert' Quiz-of-the-Week #3

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Perl provides a function, 'gethostbyname()', to translate host names
to their addresses.    For example,

        gethostbyname("perl.plover.com")

returns the string

        \xd8\x9e\x34\x79

because that is the packed 4-byte IP address of perl.plover.com.

Unfortunately, gethostbyname() has a drawback.  It typically consults
the DNS (domain name system) network service, and resolving a hostname
make require many network queries.  Sending these queries and
receiving the answers or waiting for the timeouts can take a lot of
time, so a Perl program might hang for a long time whenever it does
'gethostbyname'.

You will write a replacement for gethostbyname() that does not suffer
from this drawback; it will be asynchronous.  The replacement will
have two parts:

1.  An asynchronous domain lookup server.  This is a program that runs
    continually in the background, waiting for requests from clients
    to look up hostnames.  

    There must be some way for a client process to contact the server
    and send it a hostname.  The server must immediately return some
    sort of token that identifies the query uniquely.  The server then
    performs the gethostbyname() call on behalf of the client.

    There must be some way for the client to find out whether or not
    the address has been obtained, and, if so, what the address is,
    using the previously-returned token to specify which previous
    query it is inquiring about.  Finding out whether and answer is
    ready must be instantaneous.  If the answer is ready, finding out
    the address must be instantaneous.

2.  A Perl module that provides an interface to the asynchronous
    lookup service.  The interface will look like this:

        use Gethostbyname::Asynchronous;

        my $query = Gethostbyname::Asynchronous->query("perl.plover.com");

        until ($query->is_ready) {
          # ... do something else ...
        }
        # At this point, the service has located the address for us

        my $address = $query->answer;

    The ->answer method always returns the answer.  If the answer
    isn't ready at the time the call is made, then ->answer waits
    until an answer is available and then returns it.

    The module must allow multiple simultaneous queries:

        for my $name (@names) {
          $address{$name} = Gethostbyname::Asynchronous->query($name);
        }

        while (...) {
          # ...do something else for a while...

          for my $host (keys %address) {
            if ($address{$host}->is_ready) {
              print "$host: ", $address{$host}->answer, "\n";
              delete $address{$host};
            }
          }

          # More other stuff going on here...
        }

    If you're not familiar with OOP techniques in Perl, you may
    implement a functional-style interface instead:

        use Gethostbyname::Asynchronous::Functional;

        my $qid = query("perl.plover.com");

        until (is_ready($qid)) {
          # ... do something else ...
        }
        # At this point, the service has located the address for us

        my $address = answer($qid);