Easy way to upload, transform and deliver files and images (Sponsored)

/ / No Comments
Managing media is a really difficult task if you try to do all of it yourself, especially if the media comes from other sources. The file can be submitted in any state and size, but what if you need something really specific? You can code it all yourself or you can use an awesome service like Filestack, a utility to upload, transform, and deliver that media in the most optimal style imaginable! The Setup The first step in the Filestack journey is signing up for free. You’ll get at 21 day free trial and can cancel at any time. Once signed up, you’ll have full access to the Filestack libraries of code. You’ll also want to spend time catching up on the Filestack documentation,... more →
Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: , , , , , ,

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: ,

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: , , ,

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: , , , ,

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: , , ,

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: , , , ,

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: , , , , , ,

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: ,
1 2 3 … 93