Chapter 7. POE

In this chapter, we're going to look at what Mark-Jason Dominus called "the most interesting development in Perl 5": the Perl Object Environment. POE has many goals and many uses; to give a few of them:

• Provide a cooperative scheduling and multitasking environment rivalling threads and IPC

• Simplify the development of protocol-driven network clients and servers

• Provide an architecture for creating state machines

• Abstract away a lot of the boring I/O details from complex programs

As you can see, POE is a difficult thing to describe,^[*] but the main point is that POE attempts to hide the menial details of event-driven programming.

^[*] It's been described as a small operating system implemented in Perl, and this isn't too far from the truthit has kernel, which contains a scheduler; it has I/O abstraction layers; and so on.