Am I in a parallel universe?

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I work in a place where Oracle is the meaning of life.

When someone asks us to do something, Oracle is always the answer to "how shall we do it?"

We have a small mountain of old Oracle Forms applications, which a bunch of contractors have just spent years upgrading to new Oracle Forms applications. We have a "new architectural direction", which mandates the writing of vast Java applications to fill in the gaps between Oracle's view of the world and our customers'. Somewhere along the line we're going to become Service Oriented, too, although apparently noone knows what that means yet.

I have a couple of - rough, prototypical really - applications that use data in xml documents, and the occasional xquery which is also an xml document. There's an open source xml repository I use to store stuff, and it handles the web tier nicely for me.

Now, a customer is asking for one of those applications to be made real. Oracle is the answer to "how shall we do it?", and I'm a problem. Again. The law has been laid down. No XML repository will ever be a part of our production systems, because our production systems are Oracle.

well, I suppose you'd have to write (or maybe convert) the XML code to equivalent code in Oracle.
How, I dunno; I don't know Oracle (or maybe I'd have a job..., and barely know XML.

What should help is you've already constructed the logic for the XML code. So the same approach (within limits) should work for Oracle...

that's not much help, but I bet that's what will eventually have to happen.

Mapping and presentation. You have to lovee it.

I work with a lot of PHP and XML but the design patterns are the same. Do I store data in a DB or XML file? Well the answer is it doesn't matter. Say we put everything in a DB and some things want XML these things are directed to scripts which return XML which is built from the DB system.

It's not great but one thing that can be done is pull the data from Oracle build the conceptual XML file and then do your thing with it before returning the result. What you put in your logic layer should have F All impact on the choice of data layer. Of course pointy haired bosses are a different mater.

Well, yeah. It can be done. But the mindboggling inconsistency of it all is hard to take. Not to mention the gratuitous expense.

It's weird that PHP is making more headway with XML support than anything newer, isn't it?