Introduction

This week's activities include starting to learn a scripting language called BoxLang. It is a language which was created by Ortus Solutions, introduced in 2024 but has gained traction very quickly and is used all over the world. BoxLang is a powerful language with which is is remarkably easy to get started and already has more advanced tooling than other languages which have been around for years.

BoxLang has two syntaxes. It can be written in a TAG format which looks very similar to HTML with tags, properties and values. It also has a script syntax which looks more similar to JavaScript. We are going to use the tag syntax for "Templates" - pages which are going to display information data on the screen to the user and need to be nicely formatted - and the script syntax when we write code that works "behind the scenes" so to speak.

Conceptually, most programming languages do the same things, even if the way they approach these functions might look and act differently from each other. Almost everything we go through with BoxLang in this course will be applicable in other programming classes you might take in the future.

This week's assignment is to go through the pages in this tutorial and get the beginning of a working knowledge of BoxLang. Each page will have an exercise to go through in addition to some background information. Message me if you have any questions or join in this week's chat.

There is a folder below this one called "Exercises" which already has a Table of Contents and some pages waiting prepped to help you get started.

Have Fun!!