You said Perl is no longer of that 20 years ago., and there's a good reason for not doing these things the same way you did them 20 years ago. The front page of the datatables site you linked to shows which data sources are supported, so you couldn't have looked very far. Using the core JSON module to return your data, regardless of its source is all you had to do, no need to 'create yet another CPAN module'. All of your complaints are simply addressed reading the docs of the tool you choose to use (datatables) and using the core perl modules. No need for anything else. You seemed to think it more productive not to do this, but try various CPAN modules which you didn't seem to get working.