Links For You (3/22/25) / / No Comments Happy Saturday folks. I just spent an hour or two playing "Avowed" (great game) and eventually need to get off my butt and start some bread I want to bake today, so I thought I’d put it off a few minutes more with a quick blog post. As always, these links are meant to be informative, helpful, and fun, so I hope they brighten your day. Date Formatting in JavaScript (Again) Date formatting in JavaScript, or, well, any language, feels like a topic that just keeps coming up. When I saw this link I initially didn’t bother clicking, assuming it was about the Intl spec. However, it instead talks about toLocaleDateString and toLocaleTimeString, both of which I’m sure I’ve... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/22/25, links
BoxLang Quick Tips – PDF Generation / / No Comments Today’s BoxLang quick tip is one near and dear to my heart, generating PDFs. Creating dynamic, expressive PDFs is fairly easy. Let me show you how. As before, I’ve got a video version as well so you would rather watch that, just skip to the end. Step One – The Module By default, BoxLang doesn’t ship with PDF capabilities built-in, you need to add it via the PDF Module. This can be done quickly via the CLI: install-bx-module bx-pdf Installing the module adds three new tags to your BoxLang runtime: bx:document – This is the core tag for PDF generation. Everything inside it will either be content or directives (see the items below) to control what’s produced. bx:documentitem... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Generation, Quick, tips
Building a Jira Search Tool in BoxLang / / No Comments Developers seem to have a love/hate (or perhaps hate/despise) relationship with Jira. I’ve never minded it, but the biggest issue for me is that if I haven’t used it in a while, it can be overwhelming. Yesterday I was thinking about this and wondering if perhaps I could build my own tooling to interact with Jira via an API, if it even had one. Turns out, of course they have an API and it’s not terribly difficult to use. With that in mind, I whipped up a quick tool to search Jira via the command line with BoxLang. Jira API Basics The docs for Jira’s API are pretty good and cover the huge set of operations you can perform with it. Your root API url will be based on your... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, building, Jira, search, tool
Generative Images with Gemini (New Updates) / / No Comments Back in January of this year, I wrote up my experience testing out Google’s Imagen 3 APIs to generate dynamic images. A few days ago, Google updated their support with new experimental support in Flash. I’ve been playing with this the last few days and have some code and samples to share with you, but before that, what exactly changed? Gemini and Imagen 3 There are now two different models, and different APIs, to generate images with Google’s AI platform. The new one is Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental and the previous one (the one covered in my blog post) is Imagen 3. Of course the next question is, why two, and what do you pick? The docs do a great job of explaining the differences,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Gemini, Generative, images, updates
BoxLang Quick Tips – Database Access / / No Comments Today I’m kicking off a new blog/video series of quick tips for people interested in BoxLang. These ‘quick tips’ are just that, a look at how BoxLang can simplify working with the JVM and building CLI scripts, web apps, and serverless applications. Each of these posts will include a video along with sample code and help highlight some of the ways BoxLang can be powerful in just a few lines of code. For my first quick tip, let’s talk database access, which by the way was one of the reasons I got into ColdFusion nearly thirty years ago (I didn’t want to figure out how to do it in Perl!). Working with databases in BoxLang can be done in a few steps. Step One –... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: access, BoxLang, database, Quick, tips
Automating and Responding to Sentiment Analysis with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph / / No Comments Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph has a simple purpose – bring the sum total of all knowledge to your fingertips via a search that emphasis data and relations over a simple text based search engine experience. Sourced by the entire web, Knowledge Graph lets you perform complex queries against billions of data points instantly via a simple API. I decided to take a spin with their API and build a "relatively" simple tool – news analysis for a product run in on automated platform. Should be easy, right? Let’s get to it. Note that the examples in this blog post assume you’ve gotten a free key from Diffbot. Be sure to do that before trying the samples. Designing the... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Analysis, Automating, Diffbot's, Graph, Knowledge, Responding, Sentiment
Links For You (3/8/25) / / No Comments Happy afternoon, programs. I just got back one of my kid’s soccer games (unlike last season, the weather is pleasant and not scorching hot) and I’ve got a Saturday now that is 100% open! Which means I’ll get a lot done! (Or, more likely, play video games.) So that I can more quickly get to all the important chores and cleaning I’m not going to do, let’s get to the links. Code Listings via API First up is a two-fer kinda. Showcode is an excellent web app to create screenshots from code. It supports numerous languages, numerous display options, and so forth, and creates really good output. As an example: While it’s a great webapp, they also have a cool API... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: 3/8/25, links
Code Break this Thursday – Ray Finally Learns React / / No Comments Ok, so if you attended my last Code Break session you know I was hinting that I was really excited for my next one. For years now I’ve wanted to give React a fair shake and actually try to build something with it. Finally I’m making time to do so. This Thursday at 12PM CST, my next session will be: I Don’t like React. Let’s Learn React! To be clear, it isn’t that I dislike React, it’s just that every time I’ve looked at the code, it just didn’t gel with me. I know it’s incredibly popular, but I always felt like if I needed to build a proper "web app", I’d just use Vue (despite my feelings about Vue 3, feel free to ask me in... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, Finally, Learns, React, this, Thursday