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.