POE is a framework for cooperative, event driven multitasking in Perl. Other languages have similar frameworks. Python has Twisted. TCL has "the event loop".

POE originally was developed as the core of a persistent object server and runtime environment. It has evolved into a general purpose multitasking and networking framework, encompassing and providing a consistent interface to other event loops such as Event and the Tk and Gtk toolkits.

POE is written in layers, each building upon previous ones. It's therefore possible to use POE at varying levels of abstraction.