Robert Basic has continued his series looking at using Dbus in PHP with this latest post to his blog - using the foundation he's created before to make a chat bot that will listen and respond to commands on a Jabber network.

Now that we know how to use DBus to communicate with Pidgin from PHP and how to listen to DBus signals, it's time to put it all together by creating a simple chat bot! Nothing fancy, just a simple script that runs somewhere on some server and, by using a Pidgin account, can respond to some basic queries we send it.

His new code listens for an incoming message on the "PurpleInterface", grabs the name of the sender and calls a "PurpleConvImSend" method with the conversation object and the message to send. You can find the complete source for the project on his github account.

Michael Feichtinger has posted a simple websocket example to his blog today. It shows the creation of a simple "web chat" application for real-time communication without the mess that can come with ajax.

The classic example for websockets is a chat. This chat example has only 200 lines of code (excl. the Websocket class), is really easy to understand and customizable.

He creates a basic "WebsocketClass" class that (in his example) connects to an IP and port. It uses JSON as the messaging format and some basic javascript to handle the clicks of the "chat" and "login" buttons. You can see an example in action here and download the source for the server.php here.

With the announcement Facebook as made about opening up their chat service to outside connections, several developers are taking the opportunity to create their own scripts to interface with the service. One developer, Abhinav Singh has posted a tutorial about the sample application he's created to do just that.

Today facebook officially announced availability of it's chat through jabber/xmpp clients. This is a big win for XMPP, with almost 400 million new probable users adding into XMPP club. In this post, I will demonstrate how to connect to facebook chat servers using Jaxl client library in PHP. It can further be used to make custom chat bots for facebook.

He shows how to use the Jaxl library to make the connection, setting up some basic environment variables and making the connection to the server. The index.php file that comes with the library reads this config file and sends a default message to the server and returns the response.

From NETTUTS.com there's a new tutorial they've posted showing you how to create a simple web-based chat application (real-time, not like twitter) with equal parts PHP and jQuery.

In this tutorial we will be creating a simple web-based chat application with PHP and jQuery. This sort of utility would be perfect for a live support system for your website.

Full code is provided, both in the post and available for download, and the end result will look something like this. Messages are just stored in a file on the backend, but it could be easily modified to use something like MySQL to keep track of the messages for that session.

Lukas Smith has posted the second and third parts of his talk with Rasmus Lerdorf - a look at MaxClients and HTTP headers.

As promised here are the two other logs from the recent chat I witnessed. [...] Again I left the logs in their raw original way. Hope they are useful for you all.

Lukas also links to two resources he mentions in the second (third?) log about performance as well as mentioning one of the most useful Firefox extensions for web developers - YSlow!.

Lukas Smith got a chance to catch up with Rasmus Lerdorf (and others in #php.pecl) and "talk shop" about topics including handling large libraries and maxclients settings.

In this first post I will provide a link and some commentary on Rasmus's points regarding Doctrine (note I left independent chatter in the log in order to not have any chance of me filtering the content, but there is very little of that so I hope the discussion is still easy enough to follow).

The IBM developerWorks blog has a new tutorial posted today about using the combination of PHP and Ajax to create a simple chat application (with a database backend).

Learn to build a chat system into your Web application with Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) and PHP. Your customers can talk to you and to each other about the content of the site without having to download or install any special instant-messaging software.

Complete code is included (even the database table schemas) to create the simple application. They make the four pages to get it working and call that part of it good. The second part of the article, though, builds on this base and adds a fix for performance issues caused by constant polling of the database by the ajax request.

On the GeeksNotNerds blog today, Zeekay has posted about a PHP and Ajax free chat application he came across - phpFreeChat.

Occasionally I'll want some sort of chat app for a website, and the options are overwhelming unimpressive [...] This is by far the best free chat app I've found. It's so good in fact...it's one of those little scripts you find floating around that begs you to go design a new site just so you can use it.

You can find out more about this free application from its website (including downloading the latest release).

The Zend Developer Zone has posted part six of their tutorial creating an Ajax chat application with the help of the Zend Framework. This part of the series focuses on updating the user list for the current participants in the conversation.

Updating the user list should occur whenever the user adds a new chat message or refreshes the chat window. Since we already use the MessageAction() method on our PHP IndexController class to forward such responses to the browser, we'll simply amend it to also return a list of currently online users.

They work through the code updates to make it happen - changes to the MessageAction in the IndexController that include the addition of a few new methods.

On the Zend Developer Zone, Andi Gutmans points out some updates they've made to their PHP and RIA presentation by adding some new functionality to an existing application originally by Padraic Brady.

For our presentation on PHP and RIA (PowerPoint Slides) Stas and I improved the chat application originally written by Padraic Brady and featured in the Ajax Chat Tutorial. We added a number of capabilities to show some of the more advanced concepts in the Zend Framework. You can download the application by clicking this link, Improved Ajax Chat.

Among the updates are things like a seperation of data handling, the addition of logging capabilities (including an interface to the logs allowing searching, etc) and integration with several web services. Also included in Andi's post are instructions on how to get to these new features to check them out and what you'll need to get it all up and running.