bx-express

Everything Feedhouse Does, From the Boring Parts Up

A tour of everything Feedhouse does, from the boring parts up: adding feeds, folders and keyboard shortcuts, then search, read-later, highlights and stories shown once, then filters for what you never want to see, feed health, a reading-stats table of shame, sharing, bundles and the phone app. Then the good stuff: newsletters with an address of their own and no tracking pixels, and a podcast player that keeps going while you read. No algorithm required.

Robert Zehnder October 14, 2026

Google Reader Would Have Been 21 Today

Robert Zehnder October 7, 2026

My blog joined the fediverse

This blog is now on the fediverse as @blog@kisdigital.com. Follow it from Mastodon and new posts, edits and deletions reach your timeline within minutes; replies come back here as comments, and likes and boosts are counted. It's all powered by bx-activitypub, a new BoxLang module on ForgeBox and GitHub: your app answers four questions about its data and the module handles WebFinger, HTTP Signatures and delivery. Here's how it works, what I learned, and what's next.

Robert Zehnder September 28, 2026

What's in BoxExpress Today

BoxExpress is an Express.js-style web framework for BoxLang, running on Undertow with a virtual thread per request — no servlet container needed. It covers routing, middleware, sessions, views, file serving, WebSockets, a full STOMP broker, and a scheduler. New: cross-process cluster support, with leader-elected scheduled jobs and STOMP pub/sub relayed across instances, backed by a durable shared cache. Real example apps: bxThreads (forum) and bx-graphql-demo.

Robert Zehnder September 11, 2026

bxThreads: a bx-express port of DismalThreads

Ported my forum app (DismalThreads) from ColdBox/CBWIRE to BoxLang/boxlang-express as bxThreads — swapping CBWIRE's component reactivity for hand-rolled fetch()/websockets. Porting a real app with existing opinions (auth, rate limiting, realtime fan-out) is a better BoxLang stress test than starting fresh, since a blank project lets you dodge every hard problem by never hitting it.

Robert Zehnder September 8, 2026

Adding SSE and WebSockets to BoxExpress (and Everything That Broke Along the Way)

BoxExpress adds server-sent events and full WebSocket support for pushing live updates to clients — dashboards, progress bars, chat, notifications. Built from scratch, since BoxExpress skips BoxLang's built-in web layer. Along the way: a concurrency bug in broadcast connections, a header-injection-style hole in SSE metadata, a BoxLang update that broke page rendering, and a STOMP bug letting one client hijack another's subscription. All caught by trying to break it.

Robert Zehnder September 1, 2026

BoxLang Express Development Update 8/26

BoxExpress 0.1.15→0.2.1: five patch releases fixed empty-value crashes (query/cookie/multipart), hardened proxy-IP trust for real platforms, fixed session data loss against non-memory stores, added response outcome accessors and opt-out session writes, and closed a trailing-slash bug hitting nearly every request. Then 0.2.0 replaced the JDK's HttpServer with Undertow entirely (breaking), verified at full parity and load-tested. 0.2.1 added live HTTP-layer metrics via getConnectorStatistics().

Robert Zehnder August 26, 2026

Request Logging Middleware for bx-express

Robert replaced a synchronous third-party analytics service (which caused outages when rate-limited) with a custom `RequestLogger.bx` for his site. It uses a bounded in-memory queue, non-blocking middleware, and a background scheduled thread to batch-flush rows to SQL every 5s, with periodic cleanup of old records. Doubles as a boxlang-express middleware tutorial covering closures, Java interop (ConcurrentLinkedQueue, dynamic proxies), and defensive error handling.

Robert Zehnder August 22, 2026

Watching a boxlang-express server: metrics, tuning, and a lighter image

This site runs on one 1-vCPU DigitalOcean instance with no APM vendor — just a self-built page reading JVM metrics directly, and the habit of watching it. Covers which numbers actually matter (GC time ÷ uptime, not raw seconds), a real bug caught along the way (the JVM thought it had 8 cores, not 1), load-testing to find the real throughput ceiling, and trimming the Docker image 60% by dropping CommandBox entirely.

Robert Zehnder August 22, 2026

Things may look a little different

I rebuilt this blog on boxlang-express, my own Express.js-style BoxLang framework, moving from a CommandBox droplet to a thin DigitalOcean App container, with static assets on Cloudflare R2 and a homegrown MySQL access log replacing GoatCounter. Also: DismalThreads, my BoxLang/CBWire Reddit-style forum, is getting decommissioned end of month, no real users beyond my own test accounts, though the code may go public on GitHub.

Robert Zehnder August 18, 2026

BoxLang Express Enhancements

BoxLang Express went from basic routing to a full-featured framework across 10 releases (0.1.1→0.1.14): sessions, CSRF, CORS, rate limiting, security headers, uploads, and a SQL-backed session store. Every fix got verified live before being called done, then locked in as one of 149 passing tests. Along the way, express-test grew from a chat demo into a live documentation site, catching stale docs and gotchas that reading alone would've missed.

Robert Zehnder August 16, 2026

Introducing BoxExpress: Express.js ergonomics for BoxLang

BoxExpress brings Express.js-style HTTP endpoints to BoxLang using the JDK's built-in HTTP server. It supports routing, middleware, sub-routers, static files, and view rendering—without requiring a servlet container.

Robert Zehnder August 10, 2026