We've been writting more wireless apps. Instead of using DBI to do everything, we're doing everything using SOAP. It's pretty cool, since by using modules like SOAP::Lite and XML::Simple, it's really easily to use Perl's auto dispatching features to deserialize an XML message into a Perl object. Not a single word of SQL exists in our code anymore... everything is either an object, or a hash. Performance is good, especially considering that data is going across the country a couple of times. I thinked that zipped data XML streams must be helping though.
The nice thing about the particular SOAP implementation that we are using, is that it's using standard existing things like Apache's Xerces XML stuff, OpenLDAP, Sun's various Java APIs, browser side CSS/XML/DHTML, and so on.