That's the conclusion I've come to -- treating my Perl as a CGI script. In fact I found myself forced to do so because of Flex/Flash's rather insane security rules, which prevent you from loading an arbitrary URL unless the server is set to give you explicit permission to do so. Note that you'll want to go into the project properties and add "-use-network=false" as a compiler argument; otherwise your .swf will be unable to interact with local files. -Egg