Mason

Created in 1997 by Jonathan Swartz, Mason was one of the first-generation web frameworks written for Perl. It was originally created for the CMP family of websites, and was released to the open source community in August of 1998. Since then, it has been adopted by thousands of websites large and small.

• In 2002, Oreilly published Embedding Perl and HTML with Mason.
• In 2003, Amazon.com chose Mason as its new official web templating system.
• In 2005, the Mason website was converted to a Mason-powered wiki, allowing Mason developers to contribute and share knowledge.
• In 2006, Amazon.com and the family of Amazon-powered sites - including Target.com, NBA.com, and Amazon's international properties - were serving all of their pages through Mason.

Recently Jonathan began to plan Mason 2.0, which would apply modern Perl and web development techniques to make Mason even more successful.

These days we use, and recommend the use of, Mason within a modern web application framework like Catalyst or CGI::Application. This allows Mason's templating power to be combined with other essential technologies like database ORM, user/session management, caching, logging, etc.

CHI

CHI provides a unified caching framework for Perl - a "DBI for caching". Features include:

• A variety of storage backends such as shared memory, Berkeley DB, DBI, and memcached.
• Multilevel (L1) caches.
• Automatic [de]serialization of data as needed.
• Probabilistic expiration, to reduce impact of cache misses.

CHI was developed by Jonathan Swartz for the Hearst Corporation and is widely used in their magazine websites and content management systems. It was released open source in January 2008.