XML <=> Database

[vivek at cs.unipune.ernet.in]

Hi all,
  
  Is there any module available which does the same work as the XML Integrator 
in Java. Actually I am working in an educational institute, there somebody asked me to teach Java as a part of a Database course. As I am not very good in Java so I asked for the type of assignments they want to give to students. So here is what they told me:

  There will be a three tier architechture. One web application, Web Server,
one Application Server and the Database backend. The Web server will get the 
data as a XML document. This will be passed to the application server that 
will parse the document and will insert/Update/Delete the data in the database
Server. Similarly the data will be retrieved from the database and will be
converted in a XML document by the application server and will be send to the
user's browser through the web server.

I told him that we can use python for this purpose as there are a lot of modules available for XML parsing in Python. And also it will be much easier for 
Students to learn Python as compared to Java. Somehow I managed him to think 
over it :-). But then he asked me :

1. Is there something in Python which will work as an Application server like
   EJB ??
2. He showed me the XML Integrator which is used in Java and which automatically
   parse the XML document,convert it into a query string and insert it into 
   Oracle database backend. And while retriving data it converts the retrieved
   data into a XML document.

I know that there are modules available in Python for parsing XML documents but I wonder if there is something available for converting the data returned from 
database query into a XML document?? Also is it possible to have something like Application server between the Web Server and Database server running each on 
seperate machines, in Python ??

TIA and Kind Regards,
Vivek Kumar