Chapter 7. POE

In this chapter, we're going to look at what Mark-Jason Dominus called "the most interesting development in Perl 5": the Perl Object Environment. POE has many goals and many uses; to give a few of them:

• Provide a cooperative scheduling and multitasking environment rivalling threads and IPC

• Simplify the development of protocol-driven network clients and servers

• Provide an architecture for creating state machines

• Abstract away a lot of the boring I/O details from complex programs