Say, what other language has something comparable to POE (http://poe.perl.org/), Class::DBI (and DBI, too), Template Toolkit or AxKit, or Mason.

Especially POE. I can write a mutli-room multiuser chat server in a hundred lines of code with POE. And yet nothing like it exists for, say, Java.

Not saying am I that you can't write something that offers all that POE offers in Ruby or Java, but that would not be very fun...

Generally, I find all the hard stuff is already done and done well, on the CPAN. Usually to deploy an app I just have to connect the right modules together. Could it be that your problem domain was just fringe?