SPOPS is a robust and powerful module that allows you to serialize objects.  It
is unique in that it also allows you to apply security to these objects using
a fairly simple but powerful scheme of users and groups.

It's also unique in that for most objects, you will not need to write any code.
A fairly simple configuration file is all you need which you can then feed to
SPOPS and have a class for your object ready to go, right out of thin air.

The configuration you specify not only lists the properties of the object and
possibly some information about where its data should be stored, but can also
describe the relationship an object might have with another object (or
objects).

One great benefit is that you can retrofit SPOPS to existing data.  If you
don't use any of the metadata layers or security, you can simply describe your
data in a configuration file, process the configuration and start making (and
processing) objects.  If you want to add security to these objects later, it's
easy!

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/SPOPS/

-- Sergey Skvortsov
skv@FreeBSD.org