POE stands for the Perl Object Environment (or maybe something else...).
It adds a lot of Tcl eventloop 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...
The site is down right now, but it is usually up at http://poe.perl.org/ .
It seems to have a lot of mindshare in the Perl world.
-- Todd Coram
For a different solution to the same problem (hey, it's perl), see Stem
http://search.cpan.org/author/URI/stem-0.10/
Less mature (though it's based on a company-funded internal project), not as much mindshare, but (according to Stemsystem's Uri) much less plumbing required for extension.