in reply to My cow-orkers mostly...
My coworkers have not used Perl. They are not biased against it, but they do have many of the common misconceptions. However, we recently found ourselves in a situation where for our new document management system, hosted on Apache+JBoss, we needed a way to handle file downloads. I was told that this had to be implemented with a Servlet in JBoss because the access control system required calling some database procedures, but there was much fretting over the use of a servlet for the actual file downloads because some of the files are big.
So I said, "well, why not let Apache handle the downloads." And they said, "well what about access control." So I said, "why not write a mod_perl authentication handler for the access check and an output filter to deal with the fact that the files are locally encrypted" and they were intrigued. Now, of course, the challenge is that I need to give them some actual code :)