Sessions and Classes

Hi, Can a class be stored as a session variable? If not, what advantage is there to using classes in php? I kind of see classes as used for things that will be frequently accessed/stored in memory, but with php(web) the code is basically executed once with nothing remaining in memory. Seems kind of a pain to create a class, initialize the class and work with it all for a single execution, or am I missing something? EX: I create a customer class, then I have to fill in all the member variables, etc. But I would have to store all the info in a DB anyways, so what point is there to the class if I just need to update the DB. I can see a class for the DB access it self, to make it easier to change to other DB's, but not for a customer. Chris