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Are you writing APIs? Going to start writing APIs? Now is the time to start testing. Do it early, and often, and reap the benefits as the project grows. TestBox, the defacto CFML test suite, can help your test your API, whether it’s CFML or not.

I will assume you have the basic TextBox installation setup.
 

You can route responses inline with ColdBox via the addRoute() function globally in your main routes.cfm template or within any Module as well. This will allow you to build simple response functions or even mock out or stub a RESTFul service very easily. The paremeters you will use for response routing will be: response, statusCode and statusText.

The response argument can be a string or a closure or UDF pointer. T...

In this entry I will go over how to leverage ColdBox's Modular architecture to RESTFul routing. In ColdBox, every module's ModuleConfig.cfc you create has two important facets for building RESTFul services: 1) The this.entryPoint and the 2) routes structure in the configure() method.

If you are creating ColdBox applications using modules, then you will benefit with the capability to nest entry points so they can match to nested sub-modules. Let's say you have the following module structure:

+modules
  + api
    + security
    + data

ColdBox Relax is a set of restful tools, for lazy experts, that provides an easy way to describe RESTful web services, test RESTful Web Services, monitor RESTful web services, and document your RESTful API.

In our ColdBox RESTFul RoadShow this month, we've been talking about why ColdBox is the fastest and easiest ways to build a robust REST API in CFML.  One of the very powerful features of the ColdBox MVC Platform is that you can use modules to break your apps and APIs up into management chunks  instead of building a monolith.  Modules also let you decouple pieces of your application so multiple teams can work on different parts.  And with the power of CommandBox's CLI and package manager to assemble your app's dependencies, you can even store modules in a completely separate code repository!   This is exactly what we're going to demo today.

In our last blog post, we talked about the ColdBox REST Template, a great way to use Commandbox to spin up a REST Application Template, and get started with ColdBox RESTful services. That doesn’t work if you have an existing application, and you want to add to it. That is why we have created a easy to install Module that you can just plug into your application.

One of the newest additions to the ColdBox application templates and also the CommandBox generation templates is our REST application template.  This template will get you started with creating ColdBox RESTFul services. The best way to start with it is by downloading CommandBox, as we will use this for generation, scaffolding and as your integrated server. Then we can start working on our RESTFul service:
 

mkdir myservice
box coldbox create app skeleton=rest name=MyService --installColdBox

Once you execute these CLI commands, you will have a new RESTFul service application ready to go.  The next step is to startup an ad-hoc server and test it out:
 

box server start --rewritesEnable

This will open a browser window with the results of your first RESTFul service: