For "simple", I've used Mojolicious (http://mojolicious.org/). The Mojo-casts (http://mojocasts.com/e1) helped me get going. It's bundled with Strawberry Perl (5.22.1) but an older version, so I just did a "cpan Mojolicious" for a smooth upgrade.

I've used SQLite, MySQL and Microsoft Access as the backend database - they all work fine with Mojolicious - as long as you have the appropriate DBD module (driver).