Parsing Markdown in BoxLang – Take 2

A long, long time ago, ok, it was last Thursday, I posted about adding Markdown processing to BoxLang via the Flexmark Java library. After posting it, a few folks were curious why I didn’t use the native import process instead of createObject('java', '...') and the answer was simple – I just didn’t think about it! To give you an idea of the difference, let’s first consider the initial version: function markdownToHTML(str) { // .init() is important! ds = createObject("java", "com.vladsch.flexmark.util.data.MutableDataSet","flexmark-all-0.64.8-lib.jar").init(); ps = createObject("java", "com.vladsch.flexmark.parser.Parser","flexmark-all-0.64.8-lib.jar").builder(ds).build();... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Links For You (4/19/25)

Normally I preface these posts with little updates and such, but I’m too busy today and am sitting on what could (possibly) be good news. So, let’s just get right into the links, shall we? Translating Live Streams in Real-Time with On-Device AI Models I’ve been real excited about Chrome’s upcoming AI on device efforts, so when my buddy Todd Sharp wrote up a cool demo of it, I had to share. In his post, Todd describes using on device transcription of a video source that then makes use of Chrome’s new AI feature to perform translation on the viewer’s side. Obviously this only works in Chrome Canary, but as an option in the future when it’s mainline, this... more →
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Build Your Own Localized Events Calendar using Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph

Finding out what’s going on in your city can be a bit of a chore. For me, I use a combination of Facebook, specifically accounts for local organizations and news channels, and our local Reddit forum. This is… haphazard at best. I’m sure local "city wide" calendars exist, but I’m not aware of any that is used by the majority of folks nor do I trust them to actually cover everything going on. Having played with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph last month ("Automating and Responding to Sentiment Analysis with Diffbot’s Knowledge Graph"), I thought I’d do some digging to see what would be possible via their API. Here’s what I was able to... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

BoxLang Quick Tips – Working with JSON

Welcome to another BoxLang quick tip – today I’m going to focus on working with JSON in BoxLang. Now, as you can probably guess, JSON is natively supported and supports what you would expect, going to and from JSON, but there’s some particularities of the support that may interest you, so I’ve dug into it. As with my other quick tips, you can skip to the video version at the bottom if you prefer. The Basics Converting data to JSON can be done two ways, either via the built in function (BIF) jsonSerialize or the member function toJSON. There’s no difference here, just use what makes sense for you: name = "Raymond"; age = 52; hobbies = ["beer","books","movies","video... more →
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My First (and Last) Spotify Web App – Music Snob

I’ve been a happy Spotify user for a few years now (I transitioned from Amazon Music after they cut features and generally ticked me off) and as I listen to music a lot, I’ve built a few integrations with their APIs over the years. Those integrations were simple tools that hit my own personal data and were just for fun, but I thought I’d take a crack at building a simple app with their Web API which would allow Spotify users to authenticate and see their own data. I built the app. But I 100% would not recommend working with the Spotify APIs going further. I’ll explain everything that went wrong, why I recommend this and so forth, but if you just want to see the app, scroll... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Come Learn about BoxLang at Into the Box 2025

Later this month, I’ll be speaking at Into the Box 2025 in Washington, DC and online. I’ve spoken at Into the Box in the past and the Ortus team puts on a great show, so I’d absolutely suggest checking it out if you can. In person tickets are available, although close to selling out. The virtual event gives you everything the in person event does minus the workshops. What will I be speaking about? BoxLang of course! I’ll be giving an introductory session on the language and talking about how you can start using it today. I promise multiple, enterprise-worthy cat demos to go along with it! Come join me and many others! Raymond Camden… more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Scheduling Code in BoxLang

While I was busy getting utterly overwhelmed by deep AI talks at Arc of AI this week, BoxLang released it’s third release candidate, and while there’s multiple goodies in there, the schedular is the one that interests me the most. Currently the only docs are in the release notes, but there’s enough information there to get started. Here’s a quick look at what’s been added. First off – just in case it isn’t obvious, the idea here is to write code that can execute by itself on some predefined schedule. There’s multiple different use cases for this – performing backups, refreshing data from an API, logging stats and so forth. In BoxLang, scheduled... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

Links For You (4/5/25)

Not going to lie, this has been a long week. I gave two presentations at Arc of AI, one of which needed to big updates as Chrome changed their API a day before my presentation. To be fair, the browser AI stuff is in development and the changes were good, but I had to scramble a bit. I’m exhausted (for this and other reasons) so let’s just skip right to the links, shall we? Search with Video and Algolia A few days ago, Algolia had a small virtual developer conference with one of the most fascinating presentations I’ve seen. Tim Carry described how he built a tool to index and search short videos from YouTube. The number of different tools and things he did to build this little... more →
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