Connecting to the Server

Our second method is connect. Yes, that name is overused, but it describes exactly what we are doing even if we also have to use the built-in “connect” method that is part of the TCP/IP functions in Perl (and the underlying C library). Ours will be part of the Astro::INDI object we are creating, so there will be no conflict.  We’ll also supply disconnect for symmetry, and supply a synonym close.

# Method to connect to indiserver
sub connect {
    my ($self, %initializer) = @_;
    foreach my $key (keys %initializer) {
        $self->{$key} = $initializer{$key};
    }

    my $iaddr = inet_aton($self->{host})
        or die("unknown host $self->{host}");
    my $paddr = sockaddr_in($self->{port}, $iaddr);
    my $proto = getprotobyname('tcp');
    my $sock;
    socket($sock, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto)
        or die("socket: $!");
    connect($sock, $paddr) 
        or die("connect: $!");
    $self->{sock} = $sock;
}

# Method to disconnect
sub disconnect {
    my $self = shift;
    close($self->{sock});
}

# Alias for disconnect
sub close {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->disconnect(@_);
}

There’s nothing particularly special here; this is really just more boilerplate for anything that uses TCP/IP.  The only real comment here about keeping in mind error handling and testing.