Mason is not more "integrated" into Perl than other modules are, but I don't think it's relevant. Mason turns your page into a Perl subroutine. It's all done internally, and you typically don't need to think about how it works. PHP has to do something similar, i.e. compile the page into code before running it. PHP is a little faster than Mason, but other Perl projects like Embperl and Apache::ASP are about the same speed. You can read about other in-line Perl templating tools in my essay.