My experience with this sort of thing is that in the end you are better off writing your own tools. I know it flies in the face of conventional wisdom about re-inventing the wheel but not all wheels are the same and not all round things are wheels. I have found that you can spend a lot of time learning to handle a framework or api only to find at the end of a long journey that it won't do what you need (if not for this job then the next). You are back to square one. But then you also find that the whole thing is so complicated under the hood that modifying it is really not a good idea. Then, rather than discovering that pretty much anything that a computer can do you can make it do via Perl, you end up in a world of frustration. If you want to do non standard stuff off of the beaten track I have found no better tool than Perl itself. On the other hand, if you'll never need to stray out of someone elses comfort zone go for a framework, but otherwise roll your own with bits of cpan...