I was hoping someone could share experiences with Mason (the Perl web templating solution). I'm thinking of using it instead of PHP for a website. I've done a lot of distributed work (scalable back ends), and a few websites, but mostly used PHP on the front end (+ a number of Javascript toolkits).

Anyone have any good/bad experiences to share? Practical information about coming up to speed (beyond the obvious "read the online Mason book")? Gotchas? Objective comparisons between the approaches?

My preference is to use the lighter toolkits. I don't need the all-in-one CRUD (e.g. ruby on rails) type of framework. In fact, since I'm comfortable with the back end, this goes against my strengths.

In short, I'm looking for some opinions informed by direct experience, good writing, and perhaps a tall tale or two (am I asking too much?)

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