The Zend Developer Zone is continuing on from previous parts of a series in this new tutorial posted today - part three of the "Ajax Chat Tutorial" tutorial series.

As our chat application gathers pace we return to the server side of the application. At this point we have setup the Zend Framework with an IndexController class to handle server requests. When we receive a new chat message from the user, we will need to store it. For this tutorial I've selected a file based solution using XML.

They start with a look at the storage method - XML on the backend, pushed into a MySQL database (along with the message format). There's a quick refresher on SimpleXML before they show how to integrate this storage method into the current system.