Much appreciated Harry! The web services approach is exactly along the lines I was thinking. Thanks for articulating that.

What I would hope to do is let Perl handle the entire web user interface(forms, instructions, ajax calls etc...), and for data entry/manipulation, simply hand the collected results to the Web Service as you pointed out. Thus hopefully excluding the already developed access to the DB.

As a result, the developers working with the main app(mobile) can modify as they wish without having to have updates to the Web front end unless there are schema additions or removals.

Again, as jeffa pointed out, it seems to make more sense to just do the whole thing in Java. On the other hand, I can imagine a scenario where the app developers may not want, or are unable, to expand their internal team and just want to outsource the web portion of the project, thus allowing them to focus completely on the mobile app. I don't know that this is the case, but it seems possible based on my experience with small companies.