I'm interested in this thread because I need to re-write something similar eventually and I want to use the best approach. I was totally sold on (well at least looking into) Thread::Queue until you posted this. Then I recalled talking to one of the POE authors on a #pike IRC channel and he'd sold me on that long ago. If I recall correctly, he was writing POE for pike — which seemed a little unnecessary since pike has call_out()s built in, but the POE features that made it cool even in pike are what made me want to check it out, even though I never did. (I'd link to it, but he either never finished, or it's not called POE in pike.)

I know there are quite a number of office POE tutorials — some written by famous perl monks IIRC — but I wish there were a really good POE tutorial here on this site. I bet it would even get tons of feedback in RFC because I bet there'd be a lot of interest in it.

You know, perhaps I'll check out both approaches and see which I enjoy the most. I love perl.