Using Java Libraries in BoxLang

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One of the aspects that makes BoxLang compelling is that it runs on top of the Java Virtual Machine which means you get access to any Java library out there. This is something ColdFusion has as well and in the past, I’ve integrated Java libraries into my web apps to make use of open source from the Java community. Best of all, you don’t really need any Java knowledge to do this. Typically libraries will provide good docs and and examples and the mental model of translating a Java example to BoxLang’s language is fairly simple. A few days ago, I blogged an example of parallel processing in BoxLang and in one of the samples, I did a tiny bit of RSS feed processing. I mentioned... more →
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Using Parallel Looping in BoxLang

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Last week I wrote about converting a Python file search script to BoxLang. In that post (and the original Python version) I mentioned how the utility wasn’t terribly efficient as it needed to recreate an index every time it ran. Despite this, the performance was pretty good, taking about two seconds or so to generate the file index from near seven thousand Markdown files. Right after I shared that post, Luis Majano shared an interesting performance tweak I had missed. In BoxLang (and to be fair, this is a feature both Lucee and ColdFusion have as well), when you loop over arrays, structures, and queries, you can enable parallel execution by simply adding an additional argument to the loop.... more →
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Links For You (2/22/25)

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Happy Link Day… oh wait, that isn’t a thing? Well, let’s pretend it is. Those of us in Louisiana are in Mardi Gras season with the holiday itself coming up on March 4th. If the weather holds out, we’ll be outside catching beads and listening to marching bands. It can be a lot of fun if it doesn’t get rained out. It’s also a great chance to eat some really bad (for you but yummy) food. I’ll share a pic or two on the next edition of this post. Ok, on with the links! Introducing AX (Agent Experience) Mathias Biilmann (CEO at Netlify, they host this blog), wrote up an introduction to the idea of AX, or "agent experience". His post describes AX as... more →
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Building a File Search Script in BoxLang

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My initial blog post on BoxLang used a simple script example to demonstrate how the language can be used to build shell script type utilities and it got me thinking about other ways I could use BoxLang for my own personal tools. A little over three years ago, I blogged about a Python script I built to perform searches, locally, against my blog. My blog content comes from near seven thousand Markdown files and while I’ve got a good client-side search feature, I was curious what I could from the terminal. That script did two things: Index each of the thousands of Markdown files by reading in the content and parsing the filename into a date and path value Taking search input and checking... more →
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Building a Web App with BoxLang

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I’ve been building web apps for thirty years now, which frankly is kind of scary to see explicitly spelled out. For a large chunk of that time I built web apps using an application server, ColdFusion, where my templates would dynamically output HTML (or other formats like JSON) to return to the browser. For my non-ColdFusion readers out there, you can just replace ColdFusion with PHP or ASP and you get the basic idea. Most recently, I’ve spent a lot less time on the server and more on the front-end, but I kept coming back from time to time. Earlier this year I looked at building a simple blog in the Python-based Flask framework. I thought it would be a good exercise to try something... more →
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Using Intl.DurationFormat for Localized Durations

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Last year I had the opportunity to give a talk on the web platform’s Intl specification. This made me incredibly happy because in preparing for the presentation, I discovered so many cool features and capabilities of the spec that I had no idea existed. Almost a year ago, I wrote up a blog post on Intl.RelativeTimeFormat, talking about how the API was easy to use, but perhaps a bit difficult when dealing when determining the best values to use when formatting dynamic dates. Today, I’m going to turn my attention to a related spec, Intl.DurationFormat The Basics The DurationFormat API works like so: Given a locale (defaulting to the browser’s locale) Given a set of values representing... more →
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Building Serverless Lambda Functions with BoxLang

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I’ve been a fan of serverless for quite some time. My introduction to it was OpenWhisk, way back in 2016. It’s been appealing to me for a long time as an easy way to deploy lightweight services quickly. As much as I’ve been a fan of the technology, I’ve yet to really embrace Amazon’s Lambda product. I’ve played with it a bit off and on in the past, but it always felt incredibly overwhelming. Netlify Functions, Pipedream, and Cloudflare Workers have been my main tools for serverless just because of how simple they are. That being said, the last few days I’ve been playing with BoxLang on AWS and thought I’d share my experience. The Basics So let’s... more →
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Introducing BoxLang – Scripting for the JVM

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The last week or so I’ve been playing with a new language, which honestly is one of the most fun things I get to do. BoxLang is a dynamic scripting language that runs on the JVM although you don’t really need to know a thing about Java to make use of it. It’s currently in beta and moving towards an official 1.0 release, but you can absolutely kick the tires on it now (as I have!) and I thought I’d share a bit about what I’m doing with it. BoxLang is open source and free, with the company behind it, Ortus Solutions, offering professional services on top. If you come from the ColdFusion world, you know Ortus has been around a while and has created a huge amount of... more →
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