Hi pearl friends,

Picking nits: It's Perl. pearl is something that occurs in shellfish as a result of a grain of sand or other foreign object. Just sayin....

There's a couple of approaches to doing authentication with Perl and JS. My favorite way is to implement something like a RESTful service which returns JSON back to the JS call.

Take a look at such topics as DOJO and JQuery which are JS frameworks and in particular their wrappers for Ajax. Using one or the other (I have learned to prefer JQuery) can simplify your work for you.