Modern ways you ask? I've never ever used SOAP but I've used Catalyst and it works beautifully! The OO design and the awesome MVC architecture and the command line create and tests scripts and not to miss the test server that you can convert to a full fledged Apache like web-server... thats awesomeness. Plus, the
guide for Catalyst is really detailed and you can start with it even if you have least idea about Perl.