Disclaimer: This is all just IMHO and personal experiences. Other solutions might be more suitable for other environments.

I have used HTML-Widget in the past, but I was always concerned with the fact that my controller defines the interface. I'm now using a self made controller base class doing configurable CRUD (not auto-detected). This is essentially it:

• The form is organised and built with CGI-FormBuilder
• The validation is done with Data-FormValidator
• The controller base class reads its configuration as well as the fields from a YAML file that is loaded by the controller itself, since the YAML like source file for FB looks like YAML, but isn't really.
• The controller also does the I18N
• I don't use FB's native rendering facility, but walk the configured fields in a custom Template-Toolkit file that applies more general stylesheets, AJAX hooks, error and success messages.

HTH, phaylon

PS: I use DBIx::Class exclusively these days, at least for non-legacy projects.