This sounds like it might have some overlap with Martin Fowler's exploratory work on Information System Architecture.

His section on Organizing the Web Server talks about something called a TransformView, which uses XSLT to build chains of XML-to-XML transformations, ending with an XML-to-HTML transformation.

Fowler has some definite opinions on Beans. It's worth reading through his work to get those opinions in his own words. He comes at them from a very pragmatic angle.

And even though he's working in Java, many of his architectural ideas map well to Perl.