Raymond is an experienced developer evangelist and advocate. He focuses on APIs, AI, the web platform, and enterprise cat demos.
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:
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?
A few months ago, I wrote up a blog post exploring Java integration in BoxLang and in that post, Robert Zehnder suggested I get Flexmark working as well. Flexmark is a Java Markdown library, and turns out, I blogged about it last September: "Parsing Markdown in ColdFusion"
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.
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 build.
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 down to the very bottom for the link.
I probably should not be blogging about Chrome's built-in AI (upcoming) features as pretty much every single post I've done is now broken due to changes to the APIs and such, but given that I just got back from a conference where I had a chance to show off these early APIs, I built a demo that I wanted to share with folks. I imagine that once these APIs become GA (generally available) that this demo will need updating, but I thought it was a cool example and something that has me excited for their future.
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