I've been poking around with an application design that always seems to come to some basic issues.

It looks like the application will end up distributed across several servers (maybe three in the beginning, with the control module on the fourth in front of these three). Each of the three will host a separate and unique Perl application vital for the entire project. The controller will message each of the three for different reasons, at different times, and will require the acknowledgement of receipt and return data.

I suppose there are several ways to approach this, but I'm stuck on wanting to also build a somewhat 'universal' messaging bus (or broker, or proxy on steroids) that will serialize (if required based on the message cfg contained in the message itself) requests in/out, guarantee delivery/response if called for, etc.

This type of thinking led me to backhand and Spread.

However, in some discussions it turned out that we'd like to see Perl versions (with more limited functionality), for possibly both load balancing (for future scaling) and message brokering.

I think I'm looking for suggestions, guidance, tips or pointers to existing Perl (partial of full) solutions, name calling, etc.

Side effects of the messaging broker would make it useful for many other applications as well.

After much scouting around we've concluded we're probably going to have to roll our own, but I thought some quick brainstorming or monk-pleading here might be useful.