I just looked at it. Looks like it would have to go a long way to be what I need.

This is not primarily a screen scraper, but rather, scraping screens to get information (following next page links if necessary), then taking that information and issuing Post or Get Forms based on it. I need to perform audits on every page, making sure the application structure hasn't changed in some subtle way, and I want to be able to integrate confirmation dialogues.

I do the equivalent of all of that, today, with command-line scripts. The most complex one is about 300 lines long and that includes a bunch of cut-and-paste subroutines that I could modularize. All I need to do is wed this kind of thing to CGI applications, an area that Perl shines in, and I'm there.

Why should I take this detour into the interminable infrastrucure monster that is Java development, when Perl makes this stuff so easy?

And say, this largish application wouldn't be SAP R/3 would it?

No. I wouldn't call SAP R/3 largish, I'd call it humongous.