Document summarization is a powerful and pretty darn useful feature of generative AI, but a proper "question and answer" system can really enable users to interact with a document. This is why you see various document viewing apps, like Acrobat, adding these features to their programs. I thought I'd take a look at building such a system via a simple web app to see how difficult it would be, and honestly, it wasn't that bad. Having this in your own web app, versus an external vendor, gives you more control over the experience as well. Here's what I built.
So this post comes from - I'm mostly sure - me forgetting to show a simple, but powerful demo at my presentation recently at the ColdFusion Summit. It's nice and simple, but pretty darn useful so I decided to write a quick blog post about it and highlight the code.
Back in May of last year, I wrote up a blog post on ColdFusion's oauth tag. This was based on a feature from way back in ColdFusion 11 that I thought I'd take a look at to see if it was useful. I'm not going to repeat the entire previous blog post, but in general... it was almost something I'd recommend.
I've built a few web games in the past (IdleFleet and Cat Herder are two examples), but what I'm sharing today doesn't really fit into the category of a game. This is going to sound terribly pretentious and I apologize in advance, but what I'm sharing today is more an "experience" for lack of a better term. It's part technical exploration, and part cathartic dumping, and just kinda weird. But honestly, the web needs more weird and I'm happy to contribute to that.
One of the fun things about immersing myself in BoxLang these past few months is my expose to other products from Ortus. Most recently, I've been doing some contracting with a client that makes use of ColdBox, which for my non-CFML readers out there is probably the most well known, and probably most popular, framework for building enterprise web applications with ColdFusion. As part of that work, I've been integrating TestBox, a testing and mocking framework that works well with ColdBox, but also (somewhat recently, I think a month or so now), supports BoxLang as well. For the most part, "it just works", but as I was new to it, I did run into a few small issues I thought I'd share a simple walkthrough of how to get started.
What was my experience using GenAI tools to design my blog? Well, you're looking at it! As I mentioned last week, my new design came from one of my experiments using GenAI to help me design a new theme, but I wanted to share a bit more about the experience when I had time, and that time is now.
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