OK, so CPAN HTTP client survey first

This one will be easier. It's surprising, but there are a lot of "primary" HTTP clients on CPAN, by which I mean HTTP clients that don't depend on other modules to do their HTTP. LWP is seen as pretty large and cruft-ridden by many authors, and there are a lot of "lightweight" HTTP clients, multiplexing clients, clients for particular frameworks like POE, and so on. There are also wrappers around primary HTTP clients to make them quicker to work with.

This is what I need to do: CPAN search returns 857 modules for "HTTP client"; obviously many of those aren't HTTP clients. I need to look at that list and see what depends on what. That dependency network will probably allow me to see which are the primary HTTP clients, and I can discard a lot of them.

Really, it seems I have the following hierarchy: (1) Primary HTTP client [mandatory], (2) HTTP client wrapper [optional, may be multiple], (3) REST service module [optional, may be multiple], (4) REST API implementation [mandatory]. I really want to see a full network including all these stages, and since the main tool I have is dependencies, I have to start at the primary HTTP client end. And of the primary HTTP clients, it would be interesting to classify them by how many other modules depend on them. The vast majority are probably going to be singletons, not actually used for any published REST API, so I can prune them.

I suppose I have two possible tools: a CPAN search for likely descriptive phrases, and a dependency link checker.

Would it be possible to search on function? I think that would require more sophisticated processing than I can muster. That sounds like code understanding. I'm not even sure how I'd approach it as a human, let alone automate it.