Chris Hartjes has answered some more questions his readers have asked in a new post to his blog today. This time the focus is on XML handling.

Welcome to the 3rd installment of me answering reader feedback questions. Today we deal with a topic that I deal with every day at my day job — working with XML in PHP.

He talks about SimpleXML (and how well it does its job) and their (his work's) current method of handling the storage of XML in a database. He describes both their current process and his ideal one, how he'd want to interface with their eXist backend.

William Candillon passed along a note about a new PECL extension that's been released that adds the power of XQuery to the PHP world.

PHP developers beware: Zorba now has a language binding for PHP 5! Most PHP developments have to deal with XML and since PHP version 5, the support for XML has been greatly improved and developers can use various extensions that speak XML. We strongly believe that XQuery was the missing piece in this set of tools and therefore we are very excited by this release.

You can get the full details from this post to his blog including installation instructions and usage examples for everything from a simple query to a more complex XML insertion.