Is it possible to dynamically retrieve the number of columns in a view in Oracle? As the title says, is it possible to retrieve the number of columns in a view dynamically? 

I'm learning Oracle 11gR2 and I'm checking out the V$ views. One of the things I want to do is output them to file (for various reasons I am unable to spool the document) so I was going to output using java, however I need to know how many columns are in each view - a daunting task with 536 views, and now I'm curious to if I can do this dynamically.

I tried using user_tab_columns but it returns 0 for views. 

Note: performance is not key, this is a learning exercise for me, so doing it correctly is more important than doing it quickly (if its even possible)
To spool the columns of the V$ views in Oracle you can use:

select owner, table_name, column_name, data_type, column_id
from dba_tab_columns c
where table_name = 'V_$PARAMETER'
order by owner, table_name, column_id