While I appreciate your concern, I thought it was pretty clear that the example I gave was contrived for debugging purposes and to illustrate the problem as clearly/simply as possible.

Yes, my actual application will only grab it where I need to use it. I was just concerned that I couldn't grab the value in the setup() method.

For the sake of completeness (of the contrived example, not my real code), the following is the altered WebApp.cgi:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use WebApp;
my $webapp = WebApp->new(
      PARAMS => {
         'var1' => 'val1',
         'var2' => 'val2',
      },
);
$webapp->run;
[download]

I'm not recommending that people use global variables this way in production code.