Matt Sergeant announced the release of version 0.22 of the XML::XPath module, a major update that makes the module "very usable in production."

The module, available through CPAN, involves a rewrite of the XPath parsing mechanism, along with "the usual slew of bug fixes, and some performance improvements in path evaluation."

Sergeant claims that:

"This and other tweaks have proved a major performance boon, and using Michel's standard quran test, XML::XPath is now faster than both DOM and Grove at modifying nodes in a document."

An invoice template and accompanying Perl script that use the XML::XPath module are also available from Sergeant's site.