The choice of development language depends on the task in hand. It would appear from the description of the task that you want to do conventional networking/parsing/web/DB tasks for which Perl is an excellent fit. The task also involves all of the features that are covered many times in the monestary, so you get some support from friendly monks.

The argument would favour Java if you needed to target specific Java APIs for which a Perl version was not available or you needed to meet hosting requirements that restricted you to Java/JSP.

From the companies point of view there is the issue of maintainability. If you are the only Perl developer amongst a group of Java developers then I can see how Java might be a preferred.