This approach and philosophy was manifest within the Perl5 Enterprise (P5EE) project some time ago - See the web pages http://p5ee.perl.org/ and http://www.officevision.com/pub/p5ee/ for details. This project however did not progress further than some initial architecture designs which were then followed through with a relatively alpha implementation that did not address some of the core goals of the project.

I mention this as it may be worthwhile to review past endeavours in this space to prevent making similar mistakes.