I know you disagree, that is why you did yours differently.
I am curious, why an OO module should not have an external configuration file. By having a separate configuration file you can access the configuration file from utilities outside of the modules when you are doing something small and other languages can read them if they are in a digestable format. I use the same connect handling mechanism and dynamicly determine which conf to use based on directory location, this avoids be from having to hard code anything inside of the modules themsevles, which I thought was the real point in OO, not to disallow any external information, but to promote external information for configuration and settings. The code I have allows for BOTH from a configuration file and setting the parameters inside of the application. Here is a trimed down constructor I am using in a current project.

sub new {
    my ($class) = @_;
    my $self = {};
    bless $self , $class;
    my $config =  {
        dbd_user     => 'user',
        dbd_driver   => 'mysql',
        title_text   => 'TITLE HERE',
        database     => 'my_database',
        dbd_port     => '3306',
        style_sheet  => 'default.css',
        dbd_password => 'my_pass',
        smtp_server  => 'mytrusted.mailserver.com',
        dbd_hostname => '127.0.0.1'
    };
    $self->_debug(1);
    $self->assign_to_object('conf',$config);
    # $self->error_to_log(Dumper($self));
    return $self;
}

sub assign_to_object {
    my ($self,$prefix,$hash) = @_;
    foreach my $column (keys %{$hash}) {
    my $method = "$prefix" . "___" . "$column";
    $self->$method($hash->{$column});
    }
}
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This is all part of a much larger framework that I am still refining. I some of this makes no sense unless you know more about the rest of the framework, I will have to save that for another post.