Today's BoxLang Quick Tip is incredibly quick, but also, really darn useful and something I had wished I knew earlier. The BoxLang MiniServer is a lightweight web server that you can use to test your web applications. I say lightweight but it's gotten some really good improvements over the past few months, including flexible URL rewriting. Today I'm going to talk about something that's going to be really useful to those of you who, like me, make mistakes from time to time. As with most of my BoxLang Quick Tips, you can skip to the video version at the bottom of the post.
With full-time employment being a bit up in the air this year, I've not submitted to nearly as many conferences as I have in the past (but hey, my rejections are at an all-time low!), but I've actually got not one, but two upcoming talks this month.
I blinked and somehow missed posting this a week or so ago. Time is, to quote the good Doctor, a bit wibbly wobbly. I'm currently watching a recording of the Saints/Patriots game and hoping we can follow last week's win with another, but I'm not sure. Of course, the game's been done for hours now but we've managed to miss the news so... we can still hope. Speaking of hope, as a reminder, I'm still looking for my next role, and if you know of a good developer evangelist/advocate position, please reach out! Alright, time for some links.
With Halloween a few weeks away, it's officially spooky season. My wife and I usually plan our costumes months in advance (mine's been ready since July or so) and we love decorating the house (and yard) with all kind of fun and darkly horrific decorations. Two years ago, I built a great Halloween-themed web app using Glitch and Cloudflare: I Know What You Did Last Summer (With Glitch and Cloudflare)
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.
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