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 →
Posted in: JavaScript

BoxLang Quick Tips – Sending Email

Welcome to another BoxLang Quick Tip! As with my other quick tips, I’ll end this blog post with a link to the video version so feel free to skip down to it, or read, or both if you prefer! Today’s quick tip is a look at how BoxLang supports sending email, and as with my previous tips, an additional module is all you need to do. The Mail module can be installed via the CLI like so: install-bx-module bx-mail. Once installed, you get three new components for your runtime: mail – This is the core component and handles all mail operations. You’ll always use this. It has quite a few options so be sure to check the docs, but in general you’ll provide the to, from, subject,... more →
Posted in: JavaScript

BoxLang Quick Tips – PDF Generation

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

BoxLang Quick Tips – Database Access

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

Navigation tips for the Consumer Electronics Show – Digital Journal

Digital Journal Navigation tips for the Consumer Electronics ShowDigital JournalThe map technology uses the latest navigation platform. Between January 9 and 12 some 180,000 people are expected to attend the world's largest, and 51st, consumer electronics trade show. To help people find their way, Heidelberg Mobil International … map app – Google News… more →
Posted in: Interactive Maps