Continuing my quest to get a nice object-oriented interface to search domains. Thanks very much to everyone who replied to my question about interesting error messages - I tried to thank you on the original thread but the server timed out. Anyway, I decided to go for "return 1 for success, 0 for failure plus set an object property {error} if there's an error message". But now something else is making me rethink.

Some people want to search for 100 domains at a time. Now doing this normally requires waiting, serially, for 100 responses from WHOIS servers around the world. Obviously this can take forever, and meanwhile the server times out or whatever. So the actual call to WHOIS is a good candidate for multiprocessing:

for (@domains) { if (fork()) {...}}
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Now I am new to this, as to OO, and I don't know that the concepts mix that well. I would like to fork little processes to do the whois, and return the results as a fully-fledged object. But processes don't share memory, so I can't do that (right?) So I guess, again, I have some alternatives....:

• Rearchitect my application. Instead of having Domain->whois(), have ListOfDomains->whois(), and do multiprocessing within that. Not beautiful. Why should a simple array of objects turn into an object of its own?
• Within the multiprocessing, create a little copy of the domain object, and do the whois method. Then return a string which is parsed by the main script and used as the result. Also ugly, because it creates 2 copies of each domain searched, and because it means shifting some of the whois operation (like parsing the result) off the module and on to the frontend. Boo.
• Somehow make the Domain->whois() method fork() and make the frontend wait for the results. Not as ugly as the last method, but still shifts work on to the frontend.
• Create a DomainList object which interacts with the Domain object, and has a whois method which forks lots of little Domain->whois() methods and waits for the results. Get rid of the global error variable and just have a string result returned from the Domain->whois() method, which is then parsed by the DomainList. Neat... but how much overhead will all this object creation have? Speed is of the essence.

Once again, none of the solutions seem perfect. And no, I can't use Thread; because this module is for distribution. So anyone who knows how to do good OO IPC could help a lot by enlightening me.

Cheers, Dave.