Re: Nowadays, there are several good choices on CPAN for using roles

[tobyink]

There is Role::Basic which was partly written in response to perceived weaknesses in Role::Tiny that have since been addressed. It has some other differences, but I (personally) don't see any reason to use Role::Basic in 2013.

And there is Moo::Role which is a wrapper for Role::Tiny (in fact, Role::Tiny was originally part of Moo, but was spun off as a separate distribution) but also gives you a fairly Moose-like has keyword, and offers integration with Moose so that Moose classes can consume Moo roles and Moo classes can consume Moose roles seamlessly.

My personal view is: if you need advanced meta-hackery or need to use some MooseX modules, then use Moose. Otherwise, use Moo because that will magically upgrade itself to Moose when you need it.

Steer away from Mouse. Although still actively developed, its original author seems to pretty much share my view above. See for example the documentation from recent releases of Any::Moose.

Also worth a mention, MooseX::Role::Parameterized which allows you to create a "template" role. Classes then specify a hashref of parameters to create a variant of the role which they then consume. An example might be a "Serializable" role; classes can then specify:

use Moose;
with 'Serializable' => { format => 'JSON' };