Until now I've not much heared about POE, what's the big deal with it?
I took a look at the cookbook and the documentation but to me it just looks like a very bloated perl application server framework thingy, please correct me if i am wrong.
Are there any reference projects using it out there?
I personally like to use apache/mod_perl for such things.
Well - I wouldn't describe it as "very bloated". It's a very flexible system that allows you to throw together complex servers quickly. There are many organisations and projects using it successfully.
So consider yourself corrected :-)
Apache/mod_perl is nice - its what I use myself most of the time - but not all applications fall easily into a stateless HTTP request/response framework.