On the Laravel News site there's a new post covering a new feature in Marcel Pociot's "Building a Chatbot" series (that makes use of the Botman package). This latest addition, a playground for testing and debugging bots allows you to get up and running without having to set up a complete environment.

Marcel Pociot recently launched a course called “Build A Chatbot,” a step-by-step video course on developing, extending, and testing Chatbots and Voicebots. Marcel is the author of Botman, a PHP chatbot framework for building chatbots.

Along with his Build a Chatbot course, Marcel launched Botman Playground, which provides a quick way to get started building and debugging chatbots without setting up a local development environment.

The playground allows you to set up a new bot, add commands and test the result with an included widget, all in-browser. The playground also allows you to set up connections to external services like Facebook, Telegram and Cisco Spark. The only catch is that you must be signed up for Marcel's Build a Chatbot course to gain access.

Related to some of his other posts about using DTrace with PHP, Chris Jones has a new post about using pre-built packages to make using it even easier.

We've released DTrace-enabled PHP 5.5.4 RPMs to make testing DTrace on Oracle Linux easier. As a result, the manual PHP install steps listed in Using PHP DTrace on Oracle Linux can be skipped. There are updated Betas of the "UEK3" Linux Kernel 3.8.13-16 and the dtrace-utils tools available too. With these, you now can DTrace PHP applications under Apache or with php-fpm, as well as command line PHP scripts.

He includes the full instructions on how to install the Oracle Linux distribution and grab the Oracle Instant Client libraries used for the "playground" packages. Next up is the PHP install - a quick call to yum - and a simple script showing how to set DTrace probe. Some sample output of the trace is shown and an slight modification to the probe showing how to find only calls from a certain source.

In a new post to his blog, Kurt Schrader suggests that the Ruby language feels more like a playground to him and PHP, more of a factory. (note: pro-Ruby article)

While reading yet another article on why PHP Sucks (today's witty twist, "but It Doesn't Matter") I realized yet another reason that I'm glad to be programming in Ruby.

He sees Ruby as a "big open playground" and languages like PHP as big industrial factories that are more efficient for some things but can also "suck the creativity and life out of the people working in them". He compares a simple bit of Ruby code to PHP code that do essentially the same ask asks why you'd want to do one over the other.

There's plenty of comments supporting things both ways ranging from "that's a bad example" to "I think PHP is more of a playground - a disorganized mess".