9i CLOBs vs JDBC -- contradiction and frustration

Question

Oracle's various "what's new" whitepapers for 9i all joyfully proclaim its new ability to handle CLOB fields using SQL semantics. However, I've spent most of the day getting increasingly frustrated, because it's increasingly beginning to look like they should have followed it with a big, bold, red warning that it doesn't apply if you're using JDBC.
What's the real story about 9i and CLOBs? Does 9i REALLY support treating them like big, ersatz VARCHAR2 objects (at least, for things that are too big for VARCHAR2, but still pretty small)? And if it does, what does taking advantage of this great new convenience using JDBC require (besides dropping ojdbc14.jar into the classpath)?
So far, I've seen at least one post here declaring that Statement.setString(int index, String value) is still limited to 4000 characters. If that's true, is it a JDBC-imposed limit, or an Oracle-imposed limit? And if it's Oracle imposed, doesn't that flat-out contradict their own documentation? I guess I could live with limits on setString(), but if the same restriction exists with getString(), I'm going to go outside and shout vile, anti-Oracle obscenities at the traffic for a while... ;-)
Seriously, though... is the general lack of working examples of newly-convenient CLOB access via JDBC just because few people are aware of it yet and keep doing it the old way, or are the new SQL Semantics capabilities utterly meaningless as far as practical get/set column access from JDBC is concerned, and we're still stuck having to handle our own stream and buffer semantics just to read 6,000 character long fields?

Answer 1

how I did clobs (before new stuff I think, did early this year) as a get around for CMP. having to use oracle.sql.CLOB is a drawback but databases shouldnt change too often.
import javax.sql.*;
import java.sql.*;
import java.io.*;
import oracle.sql.CLOB;
setting::
Connection c = null; PreparedStatement p = null; ResultSet r = null;
try {
ServiceLocator sl = ServiceLocator.getInstance();
DataSource ds = sl.getDataSource(dsName);
c = ds.getConnection();
c.setAutoCommit(false);
PreparedStatement ps = c.prepareStatement("GET myCLOB from mytable where pid=?");
ps.setLong(1,aPK.longValue());
r = ps.executeQuery();
if (r.next()) {
CLOB oraclob = (CLOB)r.getClob("myCLOB");
oraclob.trim(0);
Writer w = oraclob.getCharacterOutputStream();
w.write(clob);
w.flush();
w.close();
c.commit();
c.setAutoCommit(true);
r.close();
ps.close();
c.close();
catch (Exception e)
e.printStackTrace(System.out);
throw new Exception(e.getMessage());
and getting::
Connection c = null; PreparedStatement p = null; ResultSet r = null;
String ret = "Empty";
try {     
ServiceLocator sl = ServiceLocator.getInstance();
DataSource ds = sl.getDataSource(dsName);
c = ds.getConnection();
p = c.prepareStatement(stmt);
p.setLong(1,aPK.longValue());
r = p.executeQuery();
if (r.next())
Clob clob = r.getClob("myCLOB");
ret = clob.getSubString(1L,Integer.parseInt(Long.toString(clob.length())));
r.close(); p.close(); c.close();
catch (NullPointerException npe) {}
catch (Exception e)
throw new Exception(e.getMessage());