cfml

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.

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.

Revisiting chunking ColdFusion arrays in 2025

Robert shows how to query Shopify GraphQL Admin API

Robert explains configuring CommandBox multi-server to serve HTML files

Robert explains using ColdFusion to parse and format ISO 8601 time intervals

Robert explains using ColdFusion to scrape recipes and return as API data

Robert explains quickly spinning up a BoxLang server

Robert explains how he broke XML rendering in commandbox-ssg

Robert shows how to impliment tidy HTML using jSoup, again

Robert shows how to impliment tidy HTML using jSoup

Commandbox-ssg is not just for blogs