web development

Botman – framework agnostic PHP library to build chat bots

Botman is a framework agnostic library for building your own chat bots in PHP. With the same chat bot logic you can connect to a variety of chat services like HipChat, Slack, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Google Hangouts and a variety of others (just search for “botman/driver” on Packagist). You can also build your own drivers for the services which are currently not supported (can’t think of one top of my head), or simply integrate it with your website.

I came across this library via this article.

Handling Amazon SNS messages with PHP, Lumen and CloudWatch

Gonzalo Ayuso throws a few snippets of code in the blog posts title “Handling Amazon SNS messages with PHP, Lumen and CloudWatch“, which shows how to work with Amazon SNS (Simple Notifications Service) and Amazon CloudWatch (cloud and network monitoring solution) from PHP. The examples are based on the Lumen micro-framework, which is basically a stripped down Laravel.

Awesome list of Important Podcasts for software engineers

Awesome podcasts is a curated list of podcasts for software engineers. The list includes a whole lot of sections – one for each programming language out there, generic software engineering, tools, etc.

Also, have a look at this blog post I did a while back.

atoum – modern, simple and intuitive PHP unit testing framework

With all the hype around the quality assurance and testing tools for PHP, I wonder how did I miss atoum. Atoum is a modern, simple and intuitive unit testing framework for PHP. From a quick look around, it seems to be a lot simpler than PHPUnit and I definitely need to find some time to give it a go.

Also, here’s a blog post that describes how Automattic moved from PHPUnit to atoum, which makes a lot of sense (you know what I’m talking about if you ever tried to write PHPUnit tests for WordPress projects).

Threadable – a PHP library for parallel execution

Threadable is a PHP library that helps with building applications that need to run multiple threads in parallel. It relies on posix and pcntl PHP extensions and does all the heavy lifting of process control. I find this very useful, as not many PHP developers are familiar with process management.