Oracle 10g has a new feature to call web services from pl/sql. I did not find a lot of documentation on this. I looks like you can use the utl_dbws package to dynamically consume web services without creating java stubs using jpublish.
I got a no class found exception when using the package. Mike lehmann pointed me to an updated dbws package that fixes this problem. I still can’t get it to work though. I’d be very interested to see an example that uses the utl_dbws package.