Arg, Perl attributes don't do what I want them to

Apparently, there is no way to get the name of a non-subroutine with an attribute. That means that if I want to annotate fields in a class for serialization, I need to identify the column for each one. On the plus side, I guess that means that I can move pass this particular hurdle (for now, at least).

A tutorial on attributes

The perldoc on attributes is a bit opaque, so digging about for information on how to program attributes in Perl, I managed to come across slides from a talk at london.pm Using Attributes Effectively (PDF). It suffers a bit in being only the slides and not the talk, but it does cover some things (like the handler functions) that seem to be largely undocumented elsewhere.