Does the CPAN shell count as a brower?

cpan> i /Catalyst/

Yes! ;-)

But i /Catalyst::Plugin/ is just about there, but I want to code something up and pull out parts of that.

Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way.....
Fancy a yourname@perl.me.uk? Just ask!!!

Then
i /Catalyst/
but also check out The Catalyst page on Plugins

Heh.

I wrote a big chunk of that ;-)

I document what's good and not good (deprecated) on that list and it's due for an update, but I am not using my browser again! ;-)

Walking the road to enlightenment... I found a penguin and a camel on the way.....
Fancy a yourname@perl.me.uk? Just ask!!!

You mentioned in the update about CPAN-Search-Lite - there's a script in that distribution: csl_soap, which can be used to get information on CPAN modules, distributions, and authors from a remote SOAP server (it just requires SOAP-Lite and Getopt-Long, not the full CPAN-Search-Lite package). To see it work, near the top of the script, set

my $soap_uri = 
   'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/CPAN_Search_CGI';
my $soap_proxy = 
   'http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/cgi-bin/soap.cgi';
[download]

 C:\Perl\bin>csl_soap --dist Catalyst-Plugin-Pluggable

 Distribution: Catalyst-Plugin-Pluggable
 Abstract: Plugin for Pluggable Catalyst applications
 Version: 0.04
 CPAN author: SRI
 CPAN file: Catalyst-Plugin-Pluggable-0.04.tar.gz
 Size: 3.0 KB bytes
 Last modified: 28 Nov 2005
[download]