To coincide with EMC World and the presentation I gave on RESTful SOA, I’m delighted to report that we have released the second version of the XML REST Framework. As I described in a previous post, the April 18 release introduced a framework that allowed a services developer to produce RESTful services over EMC Documentum xDB by “declaring” the resource model, including definition of the uniform interface and media type handling, with Jax-RS annotated POJOs and by using XQuery to implement the operations of the service. This was a good start, yet didn’t really go far enough to even call the resulting services RESTful because the resource representations that flowed into and out of the services where completely devoid of hyperlinks.The new version of the framework now provides the developer a mechanism for insertion of hyperlinks, again leveraging XML standards to do so – this time I’m talking XSLT. Just as with the first version of the framework, the code that goes into your Java POJOs is very thin, essentially calling into the framework that in turn invokes a series of XML-centric steps. The job of the developer then is to inject (using Spring dependency injection) the XML processing artifacts that achieve the required functionality. With the first version of the framework that was an XQuery per operation, and now in version two it is an XQuery plus one or more XSLTs. In version one of the framework you there was only one option available – to execute a single XQuery; in this new version you have the choice of three different “pipelines” – XQuery alone, XQuery followed by an XSLT and XQuery wrapped by XSLTs before and after. Included in the sample application that is part of the framework release are some XSLTs that make it very easy for the developer to simply declare the links they want inserted – no great XSLT expertise required.The EDN postings go into a good bit of detail on how you can leverage the framework. Each posting has two main parts – code and documentation. If you haven’t already downloaded and installed the code from the first release then go directly to the code in the second release; it is a superset of the former. For documentation, please start with the first release – it describes the base framework – and then move on to the docs for the second release; the latter adds to the former rather than replacing it.Finally, yes, there is more to come. We have a very early implementation of the next version of the framework running in the lab (thanks to my very able colleague Xiaotao Liu). Stay tuned, I’ll give you some hints as to what will be included over subsequent posts. I promise it will be fun.