final plea - security and applets

Here is my situation:
My company uses a Unix/Apache server. I am clueless how to install a java servlet to listen for HTTP requests so I have resigned myself to making an applet that sends the request to a Perl CGI script located in the cgi-bin directory. I would like to develop or obtain source code to do the following...
Applet submits a GET HTTP request to the perl script such as:
test.cgi?name=rob
I wrote a perl script called test.cgi that will simply return HTML which displays "hello $name" where $name is set to the name parameter in the GET request
Do I need to sign my applet? Import a netscape security class? This seems to me to be a simple goal but it brings up so many issues it is quite frustrating. I understand the need for java applet security completely. But bear with me.. any help is appreciated.. extremely... thanks

You don't need Java on the server side just because you have Java on the client side, but if you wanted to go that route, you'd install a Servlet/JSP server such as Tomcat or WebLogic and have Apache pass the requests to it.
The Java sandbox rules allow you to open a URLConnection inside an applet, but that URLConnection must connect to the same server that the Java applet was loaded from. Anything more than that WOULD require setting up security privileges and applet signing.
Note that if an applet connects to a server, there's no reason why the output has to be in the text/html MIME format, since this is just a program tansferring data, not a web browser.