Ah. For once I have all the answers ;)

It seems that many J2EE developers are disgruntled.

Well, the nature of Perl is to keep people gruntled. It might not be very couth to say it, but Perl is really a programmers' language at the very least for its superior expressivity.

Some blame J2EE for the exodus of jobs from the USA due to customer dissatisfaction.

Yes, J2EE is responsible for that and more, while Perl has contributed to resolving problems of world hunger (It's paying my bills) and promoting world peace through programmer satisfaction. The customer doesn't care, just as long as things work right and don't cost too much.

It seems that many J2EE developers feel that they where better off before moving into J2EE and evaluate J2EE as a failure.

Yes and yes! And why did that discussion thread page only render correctly the second time I loaded it? Could it be that those Java Server Pages (probably using a full J2EE stack to do some simple parsing and formatting) are overloading the poor machine?

Some defend the complexity of J2EE as a necessary evil for things such as transactions, authentication etc. I remember reading that Perl was supposed to fade away and that Java would become paramount.

People have been announcing the death of Apple for 25 years and it still a superior product.

Yet it seems that Perl continues to thrive and grow as Java seems to be failing on the server as it has on the desktop. My question is how suitable is Perl for high-end (like Banking, Insurance etc)applications. Is there an application server like approach available for Perl and how do Perl developers manage transactions and authentication and other activities thought to be only managed by J2EE and proprietary solutions such as SAP.

I really like what you are saying here. If you look for SAP modules on CPAN, you can see that Piers Harding has been, well, hard at work. (I think he owns all of the SAP modules). You should have a look at his site. It think Perl's advantage in this area is the amazing amount of modules on CPAN.