Web development in Perl these days

As you know, Bob, it's been a while since I did active Web development work. I've been interviewing, though, and man, Webdev in Perl has moved on a lot since I last looked at it! Which was maybe, you know, over a decade ago - so I'm not sure why I'm surprised.

Anyway, the CGI::Application ecosystem is a pretty darned declarative framework for Web application development, and I'm totally hooked. I did a little programming test for one company, and here's the list of modules touched, just for later reference:

• CGI, of course. But it's largely invisible, being wrapped in
• CGI::Application.
• I used CGI::Application::Server for testing.
• HTML::Template was used for formatting.
• Data::FormValidator was the core of the application in this case (just a little contact form)
• Finally, MIME::Lite did the mail handling.
• And there was a database insert, of course. A nice boilerplate page, because I can never remember the details.

This little application took me a total of maybe 3 hours, with preparation (and preparation failure on a couple of platforms) and learning the new tools. The actual coding could probably be done in less than an hour if you knew the modules.

Why should it even take that long? Why don't we already have a central data dictionary with validation rules and so forth? That's another to-do for Decl.