Opinions and Experience with POE

[zerohero]

I'm considering using POE for a project to write a simple maintenance server. Reliability is the most important factor, and not performance.

Can someone comment on their experiences with POE? Whether they'd use it again, and what uses it was applied to. Also notes on if this code is maintained and updated.

[rcaputo]

You may wish to ask on POE's mailing list. I assume the higher concentration of POE users will help. irc.perl.org #poe is another place to ask, if you want shorter, more immediate answers, but it's better to ask on a weekday.

I'm biased, but I can objectively point out that POE has a lot of internal checks and external tests. The project has over 2500 commits and is almost 11 years old. Here are some more objective statistics about the project.

[TGI]

I use POE for several monitoring scripts. They run for months at a time without problems. When I have had problems with bugs or memory leaks, it has always been my code, or another non-POE library that was the problem.

POE is good stuff.

If you haven't done event driven programming before, POE will seem weird at first. But the model isn't that hard to grasp—just break tasks into smallish chunks, and let each chunk do its thing, schedule the next chunk and then return.

Whether or not you grok event-driven program, you'll have to get used to a fair bit of jargon, including terms like PoCo and Wheel. These are really just techniques for packaging code for reuse. Remember that and all will be well.

I would and will definitely use POE again.

[bingos]

It is probably easier to say what I don't use POE for >:)

I did a talk at YAPC::EU 2007 about POE, the slides are here.

In the main, I use POE for CPAN Testing. My POE based smoker frameworks have been responsible for over a million CPAN test reports.

[Anonymous Monk]

POE is great, but i'm moving towards using AnyEvent for future projects as the equivalent code is usually more succinct and in my opinion easier to understand and maintain.