The Laravel News site has posted the third part of their series about the construction of helpdesk software. In this latest article they integrate Nexmo for real-time messaging using Nexmo Stitch.

Welcome back to the third and final (for now!) part of the Deskmo series. In Part 2 added support for voice calls, with text-to-speech and transcription support.

Today, we’re going to add in-app messaging using Nexmo Stitch. Stitch takes care of all of the heavy lifting for real-time chat, providing you with a websocket that you connect to and listen for events relating to your application.

The article starts by listing out some prerequisites (a Nexmo client account and the Deskmo project) as well as an installation of the Nexmo Stitch command-line client. It then walks you through the process of setting up a Nexmo user profile for each user in the helpdesk software and updating the database with this new information. It then shows how to add in-app notification messaging and linking the messages and tickets together with a conversation ID. With Stitch installed you can then create the chat interface and link the backend to the Nexmo service as a user easily sending and receiving messages.

The Laravel News site has published a tutorial for those Laravel users out there that would like to integrate their application with Nexmo for the sending and receiving (and handling) of SMS messages in your application.

This is the first part of a series of tutorials by Michael Heap, covering how to build a multi-channel help desk system with Laravel. In this post, we’ll take a basic web based help desk system and extend it to send and receive SMS messages using the built-in Laravel notification system (which is powered by Nexmo).

The tutorial starts with some of the prerequisites you'll need to get started including a Nexmo account and the ngrok tool for exposing your site publicly while still hosting it locally. It then starts in on the functionality, using the Deskmo repository as a starting place. After a few setup steps the article has you hop over to Nexmo and purchase a number to use for the SMS and configure the application to use this number. Next it shows how to send a sample message when a ticket is created and how to receive an incoming SMS message to pull in the information and create a new ticket.

In a new post to his site Jason McCreary shows how he integrated SMS for account administration for the Laravel Shift service. It's his method of providing good support for the project from anywhere, even when he's away from his machine.

In the end, all I need is a quick way to run a Shift on the go. Looking back on almost two years of support, I often have the Shift number readily available. Creating the job and adding it to the queue is at most two lines of code. So the steps are not the pain point.

The pain point is connecting to the server. [...] What do I carry around with me all the time? My phone. I’m already reviewing the support emails from my phone. Wouldn’t it be great when I need to run a Shift manually to just reply or send a text.

He then shares the code he used to create the administration interface via SMS through the Nexmo service. He uses the information the Nexmo service sends to hiswebhook via a special number and handles it via a special endpoint on his side. In this case the interface allows him to re-run a "shift" that was previously requested if there was an error. The code is pretty simple, made up of a controller and route for the endpoint and a "FormRequest" class for the message processing.

On the Laravel News site there's a new tutorial posted showing you how to create a simple iVR system with Laravel and Nexmo that includes voice responses.

Want to dial your Laravel app, and have it talk back to you? Let’s take a quick look at how to build a really simple IVR (interactive voice response) – a ‘phone menu’ – with Laravel and Nexmo. When it’s done, you’ll be able to pick up your cell phone, dial a phone number, and have your Laravel app control what you hear.

It’s probably easier than you think, let’s get started!

Using a standard Laravel application and a Laradoc environment, they pull in the nexmo/laravel to connect with the Nexmo service. They also add two others to add additional functionality for reading Tweets and RSS feeds. After configuring the application providers to pull in the Nexmo and Twitter functionality they go over to the Nexmo site and create the application they'll use. The tutorial then shows how to generate a command (the AppCreate command), its signature and the code to make the Nexmo API request. They then create another command to link the application to numbers on the Nexmo account.

Finally, they get to the "good" part - creating the code to handle the incoming calls over webhooks. This includes the controller, routes and - based on user input - how the IVR will respond. In their example, when the number is called, the latest tweet from @taylorotwell is fetched and is converted to text, then spoken back to the caller.

On the Laravel News site they've posted a tutorial from Phil Leggetter showing you how to integrate your application with Nexmo to be able to send and receive SMS messages in your Laravel application.

In this quick tutorial by Phil Leggetter, we’ll cover how you can both send and receive SMS from your Laravel application. We’ll do this using Nexmo, a cloud communications platform that offers APIs for provisioning phone numbers, sending and receiving SMS (which is handy since we’ll use that), making and receiving phone calls and more.

He starts off with some prerequisites you'll need to get the system working (including an account on Nexmo and their command line tool). They create a fresh Laravel application and integrate the Nexmo PHP package into it as a service provider. With that installed he shows how to send an SMS message to a phone number, how to "rent" a number they can reply to and receiving the callback when they send a response. The post finishes with the setup of an "auto-responder" that just confirms that the message was received.

php[architect] has a new post about the release of their latest issue (June 2015) - "APIs" - and how it's been made free for download.

That's right-thanks to Nexmo, June's issue on APIs is free of charge for the month! [...] The promise of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) is really bearing fruit in today's Web. Of course, we are not talking about internal APIs but of HTTP-based ones that allow us to interact with external systems-whether its saving or searching images in Flickr, getting weather conditions, or transcoding video. For many tasks, if you sign up to use the right APIs, you can build a fully functional application by writing PHP scripts which coordinate the workflow and communications between APIs.

This issue includes articles like:

• "SPOIL Your Users with Great Helper Libraries" (Keith Casey)
• "High-Performance PHP APIs" (Simone Di Maulo)
• "Putting the Pieces Together: Building APIs with Aura (and Other) Libraries" (Ian Littman)
• "The API Toolbox" (Tim Lytle)

If you've ever been interested to see what php[architect] is all about or want to find out more about making and working with great APIs, be sure to grab your free copy today!

Phillip Shipley continues his series looking at creating a client for the Nexmo API with his latest post, part four focusing on the testing of the current connections and state of the code.

At this point in this series we have a complete PHP client for the Nexmo APIs. Hopefully I’ve been able to teach some good practices and designs in the process of developing it, but I know many of you test-driven-development advocates are probably screaming that I’ve left out the most important part: testing, and testing early. Well, in order to keep these tutorials focused I’ve saved the testing to the end, and actually when testing API clients I find it easier to write the tests afterwards, but I’ll get into that later.

He points out that running tests on code that connects to APIs it a bit tricky as you don't want it to make actual API requests every time you run the tests. Instead he shows how to use Guzzle mock responses and the Mockable.io service (when you do actually need to test that HTTP requests are made). He includes the code examples to create the Guzzle mock response as well as a brief look at how to use Mockable along with your current tests with an "override" on the base URL.

Phillip Shipley has continued his series about hooking your PHP application into the Nexmo API with this new update, part 3.5 of the series. It's a smaller follow up to the code and functionality introduced in part three with a quick implementation of some of the other API methods.

As I’ve hit on several times, using the Guzzle Web Service description way of developing an API client can save a lot of time. It took me a little less than an hour to finish adding support for these three sets of APIs. If I was writing every Guzzle client initialization and call individually it would have taken a lot longer I’m sure.

The process only takes four steps and the majority of that is just setup via Composer. In order to make things easier and so that you don't have to worry about the details of implementing each of the API features, he's just created a repository to bring all of that functionality in at once. He includes the code you'll need to add to use it as well (about the same as before, just with different client types).

Phillip Shipley has posted the next part in his series about making a client with Guzzle for the Nexmo API. In this latest post he adds functionality to the client made in previous parts of the series (part1, part two) to allow for message searching.

Now let’s go ahead and add another SMS related API to show how easy it is since we already have the base client and description in place. Nexmo also has APIs to search for a specific message, multiple messages based on some criteria, as well as for rejected messages. Let’s go ahead and add these three interfaces to our SMS description and see what it takes.

He includes the code to add to the current client and configuration to enable the "SearchMessage" functionality and the correct handling of the result. He shows how to update the client class with a new "searchMessage" method and the searching of the rejections with the Insight API.

Phillip Shipley has posted the second part of his series (first part is here) about creating a PHP client for the Nexmo API with Guzzle, the popular PHP HTTP client.

In Part 1 of this series we laid a foundation for consuming the Nexmo SMS API and covered a few ways to interact with it. In this part we’ll create the actual Guzzle Web Service Client to interact with it to demonstrate how simple it can be.

He starts by getting Guzzle installed via Composer including a few extra components: guzzle-services, retry-subscriber and log-subscriber. He defines the structure (code) for the message to send to the Nexmo service. Next up is the creation of the actual client that takes in configuration settings and extracts the HTTP location and applies the provided credentials to the connection. Finally he makes a simple SMS client that extends this base client and puts it to use with a simple message defined in an array (to, from and text contents). The client then reports back the results in a simple nested array with response information from the Nexmo API.