To answer my own question
Does jboss 7 work with oracle 9i? Of course it does!!
It's dealt with in this thread
https://community.jboss.org/thread/169104?start=15&tstart=0
Reference ojdbc14.jar in the module.xml in the
..\jboss-as-7.1.1.Final\modules\com\oracle\main directory
then tweek your standalone.xml. the secret is to put in this line
<driver-class>oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver</driver-class>
here
<driver name="oracleDriver" module="com.oracle.ojdbc14">
<driver-class>oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver</driver-class>
<xa-datasource-class>
oracle.jdbc.xa.client.OracleXADataSource
</xa-datasource-class>
</driver>
thanks to Stefano Maestri for this explaination
"ojdb14.jar isn't a jdbc4 compliant drive, so we can't desume from META-INF
the dirver class and you have to specify it in standalone.xml this way:"