UPDATE (2007-11-21) JudoScript is still around and still as easy to use as ever. Groovy has a lot of mindshare but JudoScript is simpler to use, I think.

I’ve found an interesting meta-langauge for Java called JudoScript. Here is the first paragraph of that page:

JudoScript is a full-fledged, modern scripting language, built on and for the Java Platform. It seamlessly interacts with Java objects, does most operating system shell tasks with many bells and whistles, supports easy and versatile JDBC scripting, XML scripting, built-in scheduler and many other niceties.

After a bit of research, I've figured out how to parse xml using Oracle9i. The process is a bit more involved than Oracle8i but there is more functionality. The following bit of PL/SQL code will parse the following XML:

<r session="sess01" updator="medined" object="1005769145473">
 <f n="PMA_APPROVAL_MEANS" v="Identicality Per FAR 21.303(c)"/>
</r>

You'll need to place the following code into context that makes sense for your projects, but here is the gist:

-- declare attributes
p          xmlparser.Parser;
doc        xmldom.DOMDocument;
element    xmldom.DOMElement;
facts      xmldom.DOMNodeList;
node       xmldom.DOMNode;
attributes xmldom.DOMNamedNodeMap;

-- parse the xml packet
p := xmlparser.newParser;
xmlparser.setValidationMode(p, FALSE);
xmlparser.parseBuffer(p, v_xml_packet);
doc  := xmlparser.getDocument(p);

BEGIN
  element := xmldom.getDocumentElement(doc);
EXCEPTION
  RAISE;
END;

v_session := xmldom.getAttribute(element, 'session');
v_updator := xmldom.getAttribute(element, 'updator');
v_object  := xmldom.getAttribute(element, 'object');

facts := xmldom.getChildrenByTagName( element, 'f');
FOR j IN 1..xmldom.getLength(facts) LOOP

        node := xmldom.item(facts, j-1);
        attributes := xmldom.getAttributes(node);

        if (xmldom.isNull(attributes) = FALSE) then
          num_attributes := xmldom.getLength(attributes);

          -- loop through attributes
          for i in 0..num_attributes-1 loop
             node := xmldom.item(attributes, i);
             attribute_name := xmldom.getNodeName(node);
             if attribute_name = 'n' then
                 v_fact_name := xmldom.getNodeValue(node);
             end if;
             if attribute_name = 'v' then
                 v_fact_value := xmldom.getNodeValue(node);
             end if;
          end loop;

          ---- do some processing here.

       end if;
END LOOP;