The coat module was inspired by the excellent moose meta class which provides enhanced object creation for perl5.

moose is great, but has huge dependencies which makes it difficult to use in restricted environments.

this module implements the basic goodness of moose, namely accessors automagic, hook modifiers and inheritance facilities.

it is not moose but the small bunch of features provided are moose-compatible. that means you can start with coat and, if later you get to the point where you can or want to upgrade to moose, your code won't have to change: every features provided by coat exist in the moose's api (but the opposite is not true, as you can imagine).