Hi Liam,
(1) The sample perl files and the perl module implementing the API mention a readme file that explains the methods; does anyone know where one might find such a readme file? It might answer my other question...
The quoted readme.txt file is currently found in the parent directory, which lists all other client APIs [1]. As the latest version of this file also contains a link to our Wiki, I have removed to simply remove all the readme.txt comments. Instead, our Wiki page is supposed to include all relevant information for using the language bindings [2].
(2) if there's an error in my query and I catch the exception, the message I get is about how many milliseconds the query took, not the actual error. I can enclose my Perl script, but I'm wondering if others have seen this?
In Perl, the error message can be retrieved by enclosing the query with eval {...} and printing $@ if an error occurs. This is eg shown in Example.pl. If this does not help, you are invited to send us an example that demonstrates what goes wrong.
Christian
[1] https://github.com/BaseXdb/basex-api/tree/master/src/main [2] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Clients [3] https://github.com/BaseXdb/basex-api/blob/master/src/main/perl/Example.pl