Parsing Markdown in BoxLang - Take 2

[giscus[bot]]

Parsing Markdown in BoxLang - Take 2

A follow up on Java interop in BoxLang

https://www.raymondcamden.com/2025/04/21/parsing-markdown-in-boxlang-take-2

[scottsteinbeck]

Awesome thanks for this post. There are a handful of times where i need to dip into using java libraries for what i need and in both cfml and boxlang it has alway been a lot of trial an error.

Funny enough flexmark was one of the libraries i was working with. We were trying to find a way to generate PDF books from github markdown (similar to gitbook) and wanted to see if we could get there with flexmark and some associated plugins. there were a few roadblocks along the way with interacting with the library via CFML. It would be interesting to revisit the library now with boxlang to see if those issues still exist.

[cfjedimaster]

BoxLang's PDF support is nice (https://www.raymondcamden.com/2025/03/18/boxlang-quick-tips-pdf-generation). I could whip up a MD->PDF demo pretty quickly. Got any details about particular features you would like to see in a demo?

[scottsteinbeck]

Yeah maybe markdown from https://markdownlivepreview.com/ so we can see images and headers /styles from markdown to pdf

[cfjedimaster]

Check out https://www.raymondcamden.com/2025/04/24/creating-a-pdf-book-from-markdown-with-boxlang

[scottsteinbeck]

in your reference to questions about other demos it would be really cool to see the jython module in action. Especially since you’re fairly familiar with python in have written some programs.

[cfjedimaster]

That should just plain work. Let me see if I can get a demo of this later this week - got another BL idea for today.

[cfjedimaster]

Oops, I wrote the above while in my mind, I wad replying to your other comment.

So... I love Python. And the idea of running it in another lang is cool. I'm just not sure what practical use case I'd have for it. If you could bring in Python libraries, absolutely. But afaik, you can't. Is there a particular Python-ish thing you can think of that would be cool to see in the context of BL?