Well I used Perl (as part of a team of 6) to design and build a networked e-commerce server system where the CGI on the Apache webservers would make calls to a middle tier of perl servers (ie servers written in Perl) which would then either call the bank or call the backend Perl servers which would interface with the database.

Total number of lines - something in the region of 30000 spread across the CGI and the server core. Each server had a custom command set where each command was a dynamically loaded Perl Object.

The project you describe can be done easily in Perl (as I have done something simliar). You just need to read more on networking, OO and serialisation. I would also recommend you get the Networking in Perl book by Lincoln Stein.

You would also do well to look at the Soap::Lite work available from CPAN.

From what you have outlined, it sounds like you need to learn more about OO and modular programming. Moving to Python won't help you as you will still have to overcome the same design hurdles.

And thats the key - it isn't the language but the design that is important here. You would be better off designing the whole thing on paper and then choosing the language. I'm sure you'll quickly find that not only can Perl do it, but you'll enjoy using Perl to do it too.

Cheers

Simon