The Zend Developer Zone has a new tutorial posted looking at PHP5 and the new XML tools that it has to offer - as broken up into categories:
- the DOM functionality (replacing DOM XML, ext/dom)
- SimpleXML
- XMLReader (replacing the ext/xml extension)
- XMLWriter
- XSL
Things are a bit different using XML in PHP 5. In a similar scenario, you could use one of the new native extensions, like DOM or SimpleXML, to manipulate the XML data tree. This tree can then be passed directly to and used by the XSL extension without incurring any additional overhead. There is no serialization nor copying involved; ext/xsl is able to work directly with the XML tree it is given, resulting in a significant improvement in use of system resources as compared to coding a similar task in PHP 4. So now that you have an idea why XML support got a face lift, you might like to know about the different tools available to you.