OLE Alternatives in Forms 6i Client Server

I'm fishing for some advice and maybe some examples of how to get around an OLE issue that's adversely affecting an upgrade project.
We're currently migrating a Forms 4.5 application to 6i. This application displays MS Word documents (OLE Container) that are stored in the database and uses OLE to open manipulate, and save the documents back to the database. We've come across some serious problems with OLE and 6i that don't look like they'll be fixed any time soon (bug #2615804 in particular).
Since OLE (ActiveX) is not supported a web delivered configuration, we're looking at an alternative to interacting and storing Word documents using a client/server configuration. This will have the added bonus of making the move to web delivery once we decide to go down that path.
Has anyone out there had any good experience with overcoming this OLE problem? It seems like every pre-Forms 9i book out there has touted OLE as a way of interacting with Office tools and now OLE has become a roadblock.
I've had a look at the JACOB example, but that doesn't really help if you're not deploying via the web.

With the beans you've looking at visual stuff : like the look and feel project
With the importer it's more like leveraging java functionality : in my case I've just implemented a call to a webservice on an application server. There is nothing visual here and it's just called via a straight bit of PL/SQL that call my java classes ( however, in that case I could also use UTL_HTTP directly to make the call and thus not bother with java importer - but the database wouldn't allow UTL_HTTP calls :( )
For both of these you'd need to tell forms where to find the JAR file in it's java environment - but you won't have that in c/s
Another way is to load up java code into the database and process it within the database and hide it completely from Forms. I've done this sort of thing loading Apache-FOP into Oracle and creating PDF files in the database (as BLOBS) from XML/XSL also in the database as XMLTYPES.
At least that's my view on how it fits together ... maybe others know more :)
Steve

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