Wow, joost, that's a lot of really great information. My intent was originally to write a library which would work much like Thread::Pool::Simple, so you're absolutely right; I was planning to use multiple workers. I had intended this to be a local-machine-only library, but the possibility of handling off-machine jobs for particularly granular tasks has a lot to recommend it too.

For a local-machine library, I suspect that activemq is probably heavier than necessary. For a grid computing library, it's probably a great solution. I don't think I need quite that much power, but since I do want to release this library, perhaps the flexibilty is worthwhile.