Of what you are posting, I only find one thing that might be relevant in your quest. You say that Java is the wrong tool for the job. Whether that is true or not, I cannot judge from your posting, but that, IMO, is the only thing you have you can use as a pivot point.

What you have against you is that your platform (iPlanet) isn't geared towards Perl, but to Java, that you don't have benchmarks (which would only be useful if the Java solution was slow anyway), and that you seem to be the only person in your team wanting (or perhaps able) to program in Perl.

If I were a manager, I'd weight the latter very heavily.

Abigail