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ColdFusion, Lucee
& BoxLang.
Deep dives into ColdFusion, Lucee, and BoxLang — modern CFML development, runtime internals, and the future of the JVM web stack.
Latest Articles
Writing Effective Claude Skills
Claude skills are reusable, prompt-based automation shortcuts stored as `SKILL.md` files with YAML frontmatter and Markdown instructions. Best practices: narrow scope (one job per skill), specific instructions with examples, separate process (SKILL.md) from knowledge (REFERENCE.md), use XML tags for structure, control invocation via `disable-model-invocation` and `user-invocable` flags, and iterate based on real outputs.
Stump the Programmer: The Recursive Shelf
Robert presents a ColdFusion/BoxLang coding challenge to build a recursive function that converts a flat array of hierarchical category data (using `id` and `parent_id` relationships) into a nested tree structure without using loops. The solution uses `arrayFilter()` to find children of each parent and `arrayMap()` to recursively build the `children` array for each node, with an optional bonus feature to alphabetically sort children at each nesting level using a `sortKey` parameter.
Stop Memorizing rsync Flags: Use a Wrapper Instead
`rsync-profiles` is a simple bash wrapper that replaces long, error-prone `rsync` commands with named profiles. Define your source, target, and exclusions in an INI-style config file, then sync with a single command like `rsync-profiles myprofile`. It supports remote servers via SSH, dry-run previews, custom rsync flags, and profile listing. Great for anyone tired of fat-fingering remote paths or digging through bash history to find that one sync command they ran three months ago.
Building a better spider
Robert evolved a web scraping service over several years to extract link metadata (Open Graph, Twitter Cards, oEmbed, JSON-LD) for social sharing features, progressively hardening it against bot detection, timeouts, and SSL errors. The latest version uses a multi-layered extraction strategy—rotating user-agents, disabling certificate validation, adding browser headers only for non-bot UAs to maximize successful extraction.
CBWire: Computed vs Data Properties
CBWire uses data properties for reactive state that persists between requests and supports two-way binding, making them ideal for form inputs and user interactions. Computed properties are read-only, derived values that are automatically cached per request, perfect for expensive operations like database queries or calculations that depend on data properties.
So I wrote a forum application in BoxLang
Robert shares his experience building DismalThreads, a modern forum application that evolved from his 2022 project renegade-forums. He rewrote it using BoxLang 1.0 and CBWire, a ColdBox module that enables reactive interfaces without JavaScript. He prefers CBWire over frameworks like Vue or React since it uses plain CFML. The site features nested comments, infinite scrolling feeds, notifications, and supports both text and link posts with automatic metadata retrieval.
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