Thanks Tim, this is great. I had no idea mod_aolserver existed -- I'll have to see how supported it is. RE getting perl to access and mainpulate the OACS data, this might not be as hard as it seems -- from cursory inspection much of the data model seems to be controlled on the RDBMS side by triggers and stored procedures.

In fact if it is the case that the vast majority of db transaction logic lives inside the DB itself (as it would appear from a quick read of the docs for the current 5.2 version), perhaps even a PerlACS may some day be viable, using the same RDBMS code but called from perl/mod_perl2/apache2.