In a pointer from PHP Magazine today, the Oracle Technology Network has this new tutorial posted - Using PHP 5 with Oracle XML DB.

This fifth release of PHP brings many more fully object-oriented capabilities to the language, including interfaces; abstract classes; private, public, and protected access modifiers; and static members and methods. PHP 5 also now passes objects by reference rather than by value.

PHP provides several built-in class libraries you can easily extend, thus putting the promise of reuse into immediate practice. This article covers extending one of the classes from PHP's Document Object Model (DOM) library, creating a subclass that interacts with Oracle XML DB. It examines some of the object-oriented features of the PHP classes and goes through some changes to the sample subclass that exercise various ways of working with Oracle XML DB from PHP.

They show you how to create a class to extend some of the DOM functionality and create/parse XML requests to the Oracle database. Unfortunately, these XML extensions aren't normally loaded into an Oracle built, so most of the time, you'll have to contact your friendly neighborhood admin to get it up and working. It is a pretty cool little setup, though - making the "discussion" with the database a much more structured thing...