non-polling LISTEN

I would like to be able to "watch" a table and be informed when a row is updated.  I have seen the LISTEN/NOTIFY
option,but it appears to be a polling arrangement.  I will have 200 or so individual programs polling at 10 times a
second,which seems like a lot of overhead.  I would instead like to have each program perform something like a
select(),and just block until the table updates.  Is there are way to do this via the JDBC? (Our application is in
Java)

If this is only possible (if it is possible at all) via C or C++, I would be interested in knowing that as well.

Thank you.


Todd