You can do the same with CGI::Application through the CGI::Application::Plugin::HTMLPrototype plugin. It has a couple examples to show you how to use it as well.

You don't have to change anything you do in CGI::Application when you use the prototype library. All AJAX calls are just standard GET or POST requests to your application, and the only difference is that usually you only return a small piece of HTML that gets placed into the existing page somewhere instead of returning a full HTML page.