romkey's discussion is good.

which was largely a desire to use HTML embedded perl the way I see PHP used

Mason will do this for you. I don't recommend it (the PHP-like approach, not Mason). It's much easier for the developer up front and at first. It begins to cost you later and tends to make code that you and you alone can happily work with exactly once. If you come back to it a year later, it will be mysterious and frustrating because so much of it can be arbitrary and tied to your specific understanding at that time of how to solve a problem. Other devs or designers might not be able to work with it at all.

When I'm doing simple/one-off stuff I just use CGI.pm. Otherwise Catalyst is great. CGI::Application would be my next choice because it's clean and approximates the way I (used to) write CGIs.

Embperl is apparently stable but seems more or less abandoned. I worked with it... 8 years ago? Haven't seen it since, though some folks still seem to like it.

Catalyst is difficult to start (learning curve). It pays you back later when adding features, refactoring, or fixing bugs. All the things that don't seem important when starting but kill you and your time down the road.