What you want to do sounds like it would work with POE just fine. You'd just have to use POE::Wheel::Run to execute the program, and set up events that get triggered when the program outputs anything. It's all very straightforward.

Contrary to flyingmoose's long and thoughtful post, I think POE make things much simpler, as long as you're doing something that POE is good at. For instance, the thought of "manually" writing a program that does fork/exec, then subsequently opens a socket and waits for commands to come in on the socket, which are then relayed to the external program... Just sounds like a nightmare. POE would make this relatively easy.

I'd say at least give it a try. POE::Wheel::Run is quite easy to use, and if you have any specific questions once you start using it, we can of course help you here at the Monastery. 8^)

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