DOMXML in PHP4 vs PHP5 Snafu

The project I've been working on has been relatively easy except when it came to writing some XML parsing code.

The problem was that the front page of the website was flash-based. The flash code needed to have access to the database in order to render a series of images representing the latest news items. I decided on writing a drupal module that would read the database and create an xml file the flash could read. It was a pretty simple affair and all was working well until I migrated from my development environment to staging. I had been developing on a dev box running PHP5, the staging server was running PHP4.4.2 and, lo and behold, the API for the DOMXML extension had been totally re-written. I was surprised they hadn't done any mapping of the API to allow legacy code that used the 4.4.2 DOMXML to work in PHP5. It wasn't like the API had changed dramatically for my needs either. Here's an example:

Here's the original PHP4 code:

//create the dom document.
$dom = domxml_new_doc("1.0");
$root = $dom->create_element("entries");
$dom->append_child($root);
//insert the date and time.
$date_attr = $dom->create_attribute('date',date("m/d/Y-H:i"));
$root->append_child($date_attr);


And the new PHP5 code:

//create the dom document.
$dom = new DOMDocument('1.0');
$root = $dom->createElement("entries");
$dom->appendChild($root);
//insert the date and time.
$date_attr = $root->setAttribute('date',date("m/d/Y-H:i"));