"mainstream" was probably the wrong word to use. As I stated up front, I'm looking for best practices. It probably would have been more accurate for me to state at that it doesn't appear that there are very many best practices for this, which surprises me because it seemed to me like something common enough that it would have a recommended design pattern (at least in Perl)...

To your point, I very well may have to go with something a little off the beaten path in order to achieve what's needed for this project. That's probably going to be just fine. I was somewhat hopeful that there were some more established guidelines and how to go about this, given that it felt like a kind of common need.

Instead, I'm saying a lot of potentially great options, which isn't so bad! :-)