++polettix. This is a snippet of code I use for my perl client to get results from a tomcat server using LWP::UserAgent (but modified here to pull from the monastery).

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use LWP::UserAgent;

my $url = "http://www.perlmonks.org/?displaytype=xml;node_id=609084";

# Create a user agent
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;

# Set the user agent string - useful for spelunking logs
$ua->agent( "myapp" );

# Get the data
my $res = $ua->get( $url );

# Check the outcome of the response
if( $res->is_success ) {
  print $res->content, "\n";
}
[download]

I do this all the time ... the perl cgi-script (or mod_perl handler) will parse params, construct a url, fetch data (normally xml), and then format the fetched data.

Update: removed the extraneous use of HTTP::Request ... thanks polettix