How about The Human Genome Project?

And The Cancer Genome project.

And The Floral Genome project.

And Soya Bean Genome Project.

And The Rat Genome Project.

Or are you after something small and easy?

So in the area of "just ftp your files and go", Perl isn't as widely represented (although MovableType and its variants are all Perl and a very big in the blogging world).

What you'll get in the Perl side of things is powerful, detailed, much-tested modules and frameworks, and you build your own application on them.

Last year I spent a lot of time fiddling about with Joomla and Drupal and Wordpress, hoping to adapt them for a site I created. They had many features, but most of them I didn't want, and the ones I did want were fiddly and complicated with hundreds of little files twenty levels of "include" deep, so I gave up on the world of "applications" and I wrote my own. I used DBD, CGI and HTML::Template. The files are small, the code separates display and programming completely, and the application does only what I need to and nothing more.

I would probably think about using CGI::Application or something next time, but still, I wouldn't get a PHP application and try to wrestle it into submission. I'd get the powerful tools I already know how to use and build up.

So even if there aren't many monolithic apps out there branded "Made With Perl", I bet there are thousands of smaller ones which quietly do exactly what their creators want.

Amazon.com. Ticketmaster.com. Slashdot.org. Livejournal.com.

I was fortunate enough to meet up with some of the other website admins earlier this month. None of them were geeks of any description. They had been asked to do the job and they were doing the best they could. These websites are important but not core business. They're as interested in the hows and why fors of their websites as they are intrested in which press the printers use to print their newspapers.

Uploading a new article to their website is relatively straight forward and the task is shared out with little trouble.

My site owners ask "why can't we have that?" I've held them off but if, for any reason, they find themselves with a new siteadmin they will.

I've been asked to help out with any new sites that come along or with existing ones that are relaunched and I had to agree that they would use Drupal. The arguments lost.

This is all at the low/small end of the market, shared hosting, no mod_perl ("Have you restarted the web server?" "What?!"). There is a gap before you get to the enterprise stuff mentioned in this thread and I think it will get wider.

A year ago I had a go at writing a trivial "hello world" CGI::Application that could be used as a basis for a new website. It was a failure (no one felt inspired to comment on it) but it did reveal, to me at least, how much work/skill was necessary to even get that far.

If you're starting out now on a small scale and deciding what to use would you start with Perl?

Does it matter? Should anyone care? No. The OP asked a reasonable question: "what are the poster child applications now a days?" Due to the nature of the beast there aren't any.