[m0nty]

I have some ten years learning and experience invested in perl, and at the moment I'd basically agree with your consultants. I haven't been hired solely for perl since 2003 (it was a web development gig) and I was musing just yesterday that I probably never would be again. I'm just a dinosaur in a world of fleet-footed MVC-wielding agile mammals ;) So I agree with your consultants: although perl is far from finished, it's not ideal for web dev work.

Having looked at Catalyst I'm not impressed - just look at their documentation (which seems to be a series of PODs) and compare it with Django, which has tutorials, detailed docs, etc. I'm no fan of Rails, so maybe Django is a better way to go? Django is very structured, very MVC (almost) and plays nicely with your HTML coders.

Whenever I have worked on a perl project which someone else has started, it's always been a hideous mess. Rather than fight to keep things as they are, if I were in your position I'd agree wholeheartedly with the consultants, except their conclusion - just name another successor product apart from Rails and make a strong case for it. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people here who would defend Rails and I'm not looking for an argument with them.)

[chorny]

You should try CGI::Application (Titanium) - it's simple. For Perl code cleaning try Perl::Critic and perltidy.