While I would agree that if you look at POE from a low level, there is quite a learning curve to surmount - However, for use in a real-world, practical sense, POE isn't nearly as difficult as it first seems. The documentation at http://poe.perl.org is a bit patchy in places, but it is improving.

For example, from the POE cookbook documentation, the following code acts as a non-blocking echo server, much like what the venerable Anonymous Monk seeks and is relatively straight-forward to follow:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use POE;
use POE::Component::Server::TCP;

use strict;

POE::Component::Server::TCP->new
(
    'Alias'         =>  "echo",
    'Port'          =>  2000,
    'ClientInput'   =>  sub 
    {
        my ( $session, $heap, $input ) = @_[ SESSION, HEAP, ARG0 ];
        $heap->{client}->put($input);
    }
);

$poe_kernel->run();
exit 0;
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perl -le 'print+unpack("N",pack("B32","00000000000000000000001000110100"))'