You might find A new MMOG written in Perl of interest. It's about a game called The Lacuna Expanse that uses Perl on the backend. It has iPhone, PC and web clients. The article the MMOG node links to has a PDF you might find interesting. The "Architecture" section starts on page 36. Sounds like it's overkill for what you want to do, but obviously if Perl is good enough for that it should be good enough for what you are attempting to do.