You may be put off by the complexity of SPOPS because you haven't fully understood the complex things you are going to need to do to make your idea work. For example, staying away from DBI might sound good now, but if this thing works you may want to use it for a project with many concurrent users. A database like Postgres will handle the locking and concurrency issues well. If you roll your own with Storable, you will end up needing to do that yourself some day.