We are proud to announce yet another version of our open source RESTful assistant: ColdBox Relax - RESTful Tools For Lazy Experts! For those of you who do not know what ColdBox Relax is, here you go:

What is Relax? ColdBox Relax is a set of RESTful tools for lazy experts. We pride ourselves in helping developers work smarter and of course document more in less time by providing them the necessary tools to automagically document and test. ColdBox Relax is a way to describe RESTful web services, test RESTful web services, monitor RESTful web services and document RESTful web services.  Now with version 1.5 you can also share RESTful web service definitions and manage a library of RESTful definitions.

So what's new with version 1.7:

• Various fixes to JSON lint and formatting
• Throw exceptions on invalid loading of API's
• New programmatic DSL for defining resources instead of an implicit struct/array notation
• New self-documenting DSL, what would be a project without documentation
• Addition of defaultFormat() and defaultMethod() for each resource definition
• Addition of JS auto-select of default format and methods if defined in resource in the RelaxURL tester console

The most important feature of this release is that now you have a great programmatic DSL to define your RESTful resources:

resource(pattern="/api/user/:username",handler="rest.user",action="{'get':'view','post':'create','put':'update','delete','remove'}")
			.description("The representation for system users.  You can also interact with creation, updating and deletion via this resource")
			.methods("GET,POST,PUT,DELETE")
			.defaultMethod("GET")
			.defaultFormat("json")
			.header(name="x-test",description="Return test in a header",required="true")
			.param(name="firstName",description="The user firstname. Only used on PUT and POST operations",required="true")
			.param(name="lastName",description="The user lastname. Only used on PUT and POST operations",required=true)
			.param(name="email",description="The user email. Only used on PUT and POST operations",required="false")
			.placeholder(name="username",description="The resource username to interact with",required=true);

Resources, links and information:

• Download: http://coldbox.org/forgebox/view/coldbox-relax
• Source Code: https://github.com/ColdBox/coldbox-relax
• Documentation: http://wiki.coldbox.org/wiki/Projects:Relax.cfm