Do you really need to maintain a connection between steps? If you can get away without that, consider HTTP and maybe SOAP over HTTP instead. It's trivial to build HTTP servers and clients with Perl (even cross platform). And because the protocol is well understood and debugged, life is so much easier.

HTTP also offers the niftiness of large data in both directions, 8-bit clean data, and meta-data (headers in request and response), and well-defined authentication methods. Plus, if you're smart, you can perform some of the operations from an ordinary browser as well as custom programs.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.