Check out IO::Socket and IO::Select and I'd recommend familiarizing yourself with non-blocking sockets. In the past I've written some pretty heavy apps managing dozens of open sockets simultaneously and have thoroughally enjoyed the OO representation provided by these interfaces.

I am curious though if anyone has written up a stock module built for managing non-blocking sockets? Some base module that we can inherit from or at least with an event loop to do our polling/selects for us would be nice. I've rolled my own in the past and have just been using the same module between all of my various projects that use similar code, since I never found anything out there that did this at the time, but that was a while ago...