It may be that my post is confusing .. I'm still trying to understand how it all works, and what tools to use from CPAN.

I'm working from the REST definition in the REST article:

REST strictly refers to a collection of architectural principles (described below). The term is also often used in a looser sense to describe any simple interface that uses XML (or YAML, JSON, plain text) over HTTP without an additional messaging layer such as SOAP.

I'm trying to emit XML in response to clean URLs with a view towards providing a simple interface for the web application that I'm writing.

My plan is that I'll provide clients with Perl or shell scripts to upload/download files, without having to worry about providing something that needs to parse XHTML web pages -- instead, they'll be able to talk XML, which will be strictly data, no ornamentation. This is a follow-on to my previous post on the same topic.