Christoph Rumpel has written up a tutorial on his site showing you how to use Larave and the Botman package to create a simple chatbot for use on Facebook.

With BotMan it is really easy to setup a Facebook chatbot. This week the new 2.0 version was released. We will checkout how to setup a Facebook Messenger chatbot in this new version with BotMan Studio.

He starts with a list of requirements to be sure you have installed before proceeding. He then helps you get the Botman software installed and the command to bootstrap a Facebook bot instance. He includes instructions on how to test the bot and how to configure it to work with a Facebook application (requiring relevant token/secret information). From there he shows you how to set up the Facebook application and connect the bot to it via a webhook. The ngrok tool makes this easier as it exposes your local Laravel application on an external URL for testing. Finally, he shows how to test the integration by sending a few sample messages to the bot and getting responses.

Ivo Jansch (CTO of Ibuildings) has written up a review of the book "Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide" (written by Peter MacIntyre and Ian Morse and published by Sams Publishing).

When I started to read the book 'Zend Studio for Eclipse Developer's Guide' by Peter MacIntyre and Ian Morse, I was particularly interested in those types of [features you haven't discovered yet]. And luckily it contained many of these.

Ivo mentions one in particular that he found interesting, the "Working Sets" that lets you define a set of files within a project that you want to work on. There are a few places where it falls a bit flat, though. He didn't like the code examples that included PHP4 in some places and that the book started off with preferences for features you hadn't even been introduced to yet.

Considering however the overall usefulness of the book in learning the details of the Zend Studio environment, I'm willing to look beyond those weak points, and recommend the book to those that develop in Zend Studio for Eclipse on a regular basis.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new blog post from Yossi Leon about the upcoming release of the Zend Studio for Eclipse:

Zend Studio for Eclipse is just around the corner. Very soon we are planning to release the product after few beta cycles were we got thousands of feedbacks.

They've added their "new level of features" that they hope will make ZSfE one of the better development experiences out there - refactoring tools, code generation to make some of the basics and PHPUnit testing to make it simpler to debug your applications.

You can find out more about the software and its current release over on its page on the Zend website.

The Zend Developer Zone has pointed out a new blog post from Yossi Leon about the upcoming release of the Zend Studio for Eclipse:

Zend Studio for Eclipse is just around the corner. Very soon we are planning to release the product after few beta cycles were we got thousands of feedbacks.

They've added their "new level of features" that they hope will make ZSfE one of the better development experiences out there - refactoring tools, code generation to make some of the basics and PHPUnit testing to make it simpler to debug your applications.

You can find out more about the software and its current release over on its page on the Zend website.

Andrew Johnstone has posted some of his experience he's had developing with one of Zend's latest offerings - Zend Neon. Neon is the Zend project to bring robust PHP development functionality to the community on top of the Eclipse platform.

I've been using Zend Studio for Eclipse (beta) for several weeks in a rewrite of a framework and numerous sites at work and overall I really like the IDE. Its got some great features and being based on the eclipse project makes it really extensible and customizable.

He happy overall with the IDE but has come across some bugs in his time developing in it (nine of them) with issues ranging from the SVN functionality and samba out to small syntax sorts of things (like the auto-formatting).

Andrew Johnstone has posted some of his experience he's had developing with one of Zend's latest offerings - Zend Neon. Neon is the Zend project to bring robust PHP development functionality to the community on top of the Eclipse platform.

I've been using Zend Studio for Eclipse (beta) for several weeks in a rewrite of a framework and numerous sites at work and overall I really like the IDE. Its got some great features and being based on the eclipse project makes it really extensible and customizable.

He happy overall with the IDE but has come across some bugs in his time developing in it (nine of them) with issues ranging from the SVN functionality and samba out to small syntax sorts of things (like the auto-formatting).

Roy Ganor-Shwaartz (Team Leader at Zend for the PDT/Zend Studio for Eclipse projects) dropped us a line to let us know that he'll be speaking at this year's EclipseCon (2008).

It seems that PHP developers have attracted much attention from the Eclipse community. In the next EclipseCon conference I am going to make two sessions about PDT and its ecosystem.

His two talks are: Developing Rich Internet Application with Eclipse Tools (Wednesday) and Extending the PDT Project (Tuesday).

EclipseCon 2008 is happening March 17th through the 20th in Santa Clara, California and there's still time to get in on the Early Bird Discount for your registration (through Dec. 31st). Check out the conference schedule for a complete list of speakers.

Roy Ganor-Shwaartz (Team Leader at Zend for the PDT/Zend Studio for Eclipse projects) dropped us a line to let us know that he'll be speaking at this year's EclipseCon (2008).

It seems that PHP developers have attracted much attention from the Eclipse community. In the next EclipseCon conference I am going to make two sessions about PDT and its ecosystem.

His two talks are: Developing Rich Internet Application with Eclipse Tools (Wednesday) and Extending the PDT Project (Tuesday).

EclipseCon 2008 is happening March 17th through the 20th in Santa Clara, California and there's still time to get in on the Early Bird Discount for your registration (through Dec. 31st). Check out the conference schedule for a complete list of speakers.

James McGlinn has posted some of his thoughts on the recent announcement from Zend concerning the "open to the public" beta they've moved their Zend Neon IDE into.

First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio’s chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).

He talks about the workspace setup (Eclipse is familiar to most), how the editor flows, features it includes - like code folding and auto-complete - and the Code Analyzer feature that helps you keep track of potential bugs in your code.

James McGlinn has posted some of his thoughts on the recent announcement from Zend concerning the "open to the public" beta they've moved their Zend Neon IDE into.

First impressions were that the interface is more refined than Zend Studio’s chunky Java widget set, but there is a performance hit - at least the first time it took considerably longer to get started than the current Zend Studio 5.5 (this is on my daily workhorse, an aging but reliable PowerBook G4).

He talks about the workspace setup (Eclipse is familiar to most), how the editor flows, features it includes - like code folding and auto-complete - and the Code Analyzer feature that helps you keep track of potential bugs in your code.