POE stands for the Perl Object Environment (or maybe something else...).
It adds a lot of Tcl event loop stuff to Perl (without anyone seemingly noticing how Tcl-like the stuff really is.
The idea: Use lots of discrete tasks (event handlers) instead of threading. Hmmm...
POE' website is http://poe.perl.org/ .
It seems to have a lot of mindshare in the Perl world.
-- Todd Coram
For a different solution to a related problem (hey, it's perl), see Stem
http://search.cpan.org/author/URI/stem-0.10/
Less mature, not as much mindshare, and geared slightly more towards network-transparent message-passing (vs POE's event loop approach). According to the author, it's architecturally more straightforward and easier to extend.