Using Resultsets in Oracle without being Proprietary

Question

Suns tutorial path for returning resultsets from stored procedures indicates that the following should work...
CallableStatement cs = con.prepareCall("{call SHOW_SUPPLIERS}");
ResultSet rs = cs.executeQuery();
Thats if you build your stored procedure something like this ...
String createProcedure = "create procedure SHOW_SUPPLIERS " + "as " + "select SUPPLIERS.SUP_NAME, COFFEES.COF_NAME " + "from SUPPLIERS, COFFEES " + "where SUPPLIERS.SUP_ID = COFFEES.SUP_ID " + "order by SUP_NAME";
We are using oracle 8.1.6. However I've been told that with oracle procedures when you return a result set from a called procedure you return a p_cursor variable. Somthing like this
(p_cursor in out SHOW_SUPPLIERS.SHOCurTyp)
is
begin
open p_cursor for
select * from suppliers
In which case the above mentioned sun code doesn't work.
We want to use jdbc to call a stored procedure that returns a resultset that does not require us to import any proprietary oracle objects...
Is there another way to write these stored procedures, rather than using this cursor construct? Are we missing something in the way we invoke them?
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Answer 1

Note the following remarks that prefix the sample code you quote from JavaSoft:
As previously stated, the syntax for defining a stored procedure is different for each DBMS. For example, some use begin . . . end or other keywords to indicate the beginning and ending of the procedure definition. In some DBMSs, the following SQL statement creates a stored procedure: [sample code]
In the future a good bet for writing stored procedures in a portable way will be to use ANSI SQLJ part 1 specification. (Unfortunately, at this point in time Oracle supports only the functionality of SQLJ part 1 but not yet the syntax.)
In the meantime, you may want to apply good old encapsulation to abstract away each vendors' specific SQL syntax and JDBC usage.
One more note: putting queries into stored procedures and returning them as ref cursors (rather than executing them at the top level) will decrease your query performance.