In my code, the network handling routines were pretty small. And I used shared hashes for passing paramters and data (but I could serialise them so an application's state would persist across restarts of the server - oh for first-class closures).

POE would work as well as any other server daemon. It's a matter of what you're comfortable with.

Having played with writing a fair bit of GUI stuff, I've found that most of the work is in stupid, boring bookeeping - implementing Widget::Button, Widget::RadioButton, Widget::CheckButton, etc.

Even with OO and using inheritence and eval tricks, it's still repetitive.