The goal of the Oyster class is to provide a clean, object oriented interface into the Perl interpreter. The idea for Oyster came about as I was doing a project for work. This particular project needed a certain functionality that I just couldn't find implemented in any PHP library. I then found the perfect library for the job in CPAN. I took the option of using this CPAN module in conjunction with some "glue" code that converted a Perl array construct (actually, an anonymous array, which is returned by Data::Dumper) into a PHP one. It worked, but then I had the idea of generalizing it so that I could call upon the power of CPAN in a PHP project whenever I needed it. Oyster is the result.
Oyster isn't intended to run entire applications or even scripts. The idea behind oyster is simply to be able to give your PHP code the ability Perl-specific functionalities and neat CPAN modules that have no PHP equivalent. Eventually I want oyster to provide the capability to juggle around Perl objects (which are actually scalars, and which usually reference a hash) and call methods on those objects within PHP.