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The official blog of Team Mach-II and is the best place to stay up to date on all things Mach-II.

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Viewing Category: Mach-II 1.6 [clear category selection]

(displaying entries 1 - 10)

Let's Get Logging!

With Mach-II 1.6 already published as a stable release, a fair amount of focus has shifted to the development of 1.8 (Simplicity) and upcoming features such as the handy Environment and HTMLHelper properties, redirect enhancements, and more.

However, before too much focus shifts away from 1.5 and 1.6, I would like to remind Mach-II users about one feature in particular that should certainly not slip under the radar.

more ...

Mach-II 1.6 introduced a Logging package, which comes bundled with the framework, that is a real a treat to work with. I can say from personal experience that as a relative newcomer to Mach-II, using the logging package was an absolute must. The default logger provides a detailed look at exactly what happens throughout the life of your Mach-II requests, and can highlight everything from which events are announced in what order, to where your plugin points are being called, to exactly how many milliseconds each part of the request takes to process. A real wealth of information is suddenly at your fingertips as the logger shows exactly what Mach-II is doing "under the hood."

The icing on the cake here is that (by default) all this information is dropped out on the bottom of your view just by adding a single line of .xml configuration to your mach-ii.xml file. Simply include the loggingProperty.xml configuration file, and you're off and running with the logger's smart defaults. By tweaking the .xml configuration for the logging property you can easily configure a separate email logger to send emails (such as error alerts), or enable a CFLog logger which will write output to your CFML engine's log files. Each logger is fully customizable by modifying the .xml configuration settings.

Perhaps most impressive to me about the logging package is the amount of detailed research that went into its design. Believe me, I'm not patting myself on the back here (because I had nothing to do with it), I've just been fortunate enough use the package and see the positive impact it has had on my development experience. In all seriousness, I do know that many hours were spent researching and evaluating existing logging packages before the engineering process for the Mach-II logging package ever began. In fact, special care was taken to ensure that the loggers use industry standard logging levels, and have been designed completely independently of the Mach-II framework. Yep, this means that the logging package can even be used just as effectively in non Mach-II applications as it can with Mach-II apps.

The last point I'll make is that the Mach-II dashboard (another vital tool for Mach-II development) has built-in functionality to make managing your Mach-II logging package even easier. From the dashboard you can enable and disable different loggers, as well as controlling the logging level for each logger individually. But don't take my word for it - if you haven't, take a few minutes to enable logging in your newest Mach-II application and see what you think!

If you'd like to read up on more of the specifics of plugging in the logging package into your application, check out this article on the Mach-II wiki

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Posted 4/2/09 @ 8:45 AM by Brian FitzGerald

Mach-II 1.6.1 Stable Available

Mach-II 1.6.1 stable is now available! This is a maintenance release of Mach-II 1.6 that resolves the following bugs:

As always we're extremely conscientious about backwards compatibility so you should experience zero problems upgrading.

Now back to development on 1.8!

Mach-II 1.6 | Send
Posted 3/29/09 @ 6:16 PM by Matt Woodward

Mach-II 1.6.1 Maintenance Release Nightlies and BER

For those of you interested in Mach-II 1.6.1 that we'll release in a few weeks, we have now branched the 1.6.0 trunk and fixed the "buglets" that Matt mentioned in a previous post.

Nightly ZIPs:
http://www.mach-ii.com/nightly/MachII_1-6-1_nightly.zip

BER via SVN:
http://greatbiztoolsllc.svn.cvsdude.com/mach-ii/framework/1-6-1/trunk/

So if you have found any "buglets" in Mach-II 1.6.0, let us know before March 16th or otherwise you'll have to hold your peace until 1.8 is released.

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Posted 3/4/09 @ 4:30 AM by Peter J. Farrell

Mach-II 1.6.1 Maintenance Release: Speak Now or Wait for 1.8!

Since the release of Mach-II 1.6 we've noticed three small buglets that we're going to make available in an official 1.6.1 maintenance release, particularly since these items have already been fixed in the source code repository. The specific tickets are #231, #232, and #235.

We got a bit ahead of ourselves with development on 1.8, however, so we'll be releasing a 1.8 alpha (or maybe even beta) hot on the heels of 1.6.1. So consider this your chance to speak now or wait for 1.8, because anything that doesn't make it into 1.6.1 will be put into 1.8. (Not that you'll have to wait long for 1.8 anyway ... ;-)

Mach-II 1.6.1 will be released on 3/16/2009, so if you've run into anything else that needs some quick attention, let us know before then!

Mach-II 1.6 | Send
Posted 3/3/09 @ 9:09 PM by Matt Woodward

Mach-II 1.6.0 Development Stats - Wow!

I thought it would be interesting research a bit of a retrospective on the development of Mach-II 1.6 over the past year. Team Mach-II has decided to make some changes in how we schedule features and enhancements for future releases in order make more frequent releases of the framework instead of larger less frequent releases. For example even though Mach-II 1.6 was released in early February 2009, the next release of Mach-II which is code named "Simplicity" should be released as Beta in March.

As the stats below indicate, there was a lot of effort put into Mach-II 1.6 by Team Mach-II. We really discuss, plan and research all the new features that go into Mach-II. So there are countless hundreds of hours that have been put into the development of the project that go uncounted below. This happens because we don't engineer any of our features haphazardly instead it almost because an obsessive compulsive desire to make things work "just right". This is one of the hidden "features" of Mach-II which is the quality of the framework and the effort behind it mostly goes unseen by most users of the framework. I personally want to say thank you to the rest of the team for all of your efforts into this release. Without further ado, let's get to the stats (and yes, if you know me, I love the "stats"):

Mach-II 1.6 Development Overview

Total Number of Commits:
474

Total Number of Tickets:
127

Total Released Nightlies:
60

Total Development Period:
17 months

Released Versions:
Alpha - 6/1/2008
Beta - 9/23/2008
RC1 - 11/10/2008
RC2 - 1/5/2009
Stable - 2/9/2009

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Posted 2/26/09 @ 7:00 PM by Peter J. Farrell

Mach-II 1.6 Final Released!

Team Mach-II is very pleased to announce that Mach-II 1.6 final has been released! Since 1.6 has been available in alpha, beta, and release candidate form for a while, many people have already been using it in production and taking advantage of the great new features, but if you haven't checked out 1.6 yet, here's what you're missing:

Caching: an easy-to-use, granular caching layer that puts you in total control of what's cached, how it's cached, and how and when it's refreshed. Mach-II 1.6 ships with aCFML caching implementation, but the architecture is designed to allow for other implementations to such as ehcache or memcached to be used seamlessly by creating a simple adapter.
Logging: a full logging package that out of the box allows logging to screen, file, or email. The logging package adheres to the Apache Commons Logging levels (trace, debug, info, warn, error, fatal), and allows for different log actions to be taken based on the level of the message. For example, you can easily log a warn level to a file, but send error levels via email. As with the caching package, other implementations of logging can easily be added to Mach-II.
Publish/Subscribe Listener Notification: Rather than have redundant lists of listener calls in multiple event handlers, Mach-II 1.6 supports a publish/subscribe method of listener notification, whereby a single message broadcast can notify multiple listeners that have registered an interest in that message. Note that direct listener notification is still supported and may be preferable in many instances, but this is another option that may be used where it makes sense to do so.Multithreaded listener notifications are supported on ColdFusion 8. Multithreading may work fine on Open BlueDragon and Railo as well since they adhere to the CF 8 syntax for threading, but multithreading will be officially supported in Mach-II 1.8 or a post-1.6 maintenance release.
Improved Application.cfc Bootstrapper: The Application.cfc bootstrapper has been greatly simplified, with "smart defaults" in the mach-ii.cfc that the bootstrapper extends, meaning in many cases you will not have to manipulate Application.cfc at all. A new MACHII_ONLOAD_REQUEST_TIMEOUT attribute has also been added to give you control over the request timeout for the initial load of the application.
New ColdSpring Property: The ColdSpring plugin has been deprecated in favor of the new ColdSpring Property, which is maintained by the Mach-II team and offers greater functionality as compared with the plugin. New in Mach-II 1.6 is the new DEPENDS attribute of the CFCOMPONENT tag, which allows for the resolution of dependencies in listeners, filters, and plugins without writing setters or using constructor argument injection for the dependencies. The ColdSpring Property also allows ColdSpring-managed beans to be injected into the Mach-II Property Manager, making them available as Properties on the Mach-II side of your application.
Utility Connector: the Utility Connector allows you to easily extend Mach-II's caching and logging capabilities into the model/business logic layer of your application. Specifically, it does this by allowing the caching and logging layers to be used from withinColdSpring or another bean factory.
New Plugin Points: plugin points for onSessionStart and onSessionEnd have been added.
An OVERWRITE attribute has been added to <event-arg> which allows you to specify whether or not to use the value of the <event-arg> if an argument with the same name already exists in the event.
A PERSISTARGIGNORE attribute has been added to the <redirect> command so that you may specify a comma-delimited list of event arguments that will not be persisted across a redirect.

While we think the caching and logging functionality alone are reason enough to use Mach-II, we designed the caching and logging packages so they may be used independently of Mach-II. Mach-II has built-in loaders for caching and logging of course, but otherwise the caching and logging are in no way tied to Mach-II, so by writing a loader for your own implementation you can use caching and logging outside of Mach-II.

One of the core values of the Mach-II project is transparency in everything we do, and this helped make Mach-II 1.6 a great release. By soliciting feedback on features as early as we possibly can, and through your participation by telling us what you think, how you want the features to work, and most importantly by testing your code on alphas and betas, you are helping make Mach-II stronger. Thanks so much to our fantastic users for their help! We had a couple of companies building large applications on Mach-II 1.6 very early in the process, and their feedback was invaluable.

No rest for the weary (or is that wicked?), so next up is Mach-II 1.8, which is already about 90% complete. As we've said a couple of times before, after the 1.6 release we're going to release fewer features more frequently so that we can better manage our release cycle as well as get new features into your hot little hands even sooner. Look for preliminary specs on Mach-II 1.8 features very soon.

In the meantime, go grab Mach-II 1.6 final and let us know what you think!

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Posted 2/9/09 @ 9:10 AM by Matt Woodward

New Documentation: Build Apps Faster with Environment Property and sick of writting setters for CS?

There's been a lot of activity on documentation on the Mach-II wiki on Trac and it's some great stuff! We've been working on solving common things people do in Mach-II applications and make them easier or more automated.

EnvironmentProperty.cfc in Mach-II 1.8

Ever need to set Mach-II properties that differ based on whether your application is deployment in a development, staging, quality assurance or production environment? Then the new EnvironmentProperty.cfc that will ship with Mach-II 1.8 will fill those shoes for you. Even better yet is that this is already available in the nightly release of Mach-II 1.8 (available from the code page). So check out how to use the new EnvironmentProperty.cfc now.

Depends Attribute for ColdSpring Autowiring and Forget the Setters in Mach-II 1.6

Sick of writting getters/setters in your listeners, filters or plugins so ColdSpring can autowire them? Well, you don't need to do that any more! The 'depends' attribute and the new ColdSpringProperty.cfc bundled with Mach-II 1.6 (currently in RC2) takes care of that for you. Go from having a bunch of getters/setters in your Mach-II extended component to getting rid of them just have listing the objects you want ColdSpring to autowire in by defining them in the custom 'depends' attribute of the cfcomponent. Read all about how to make your listener, filter and plugin code lighter and save some typing by using the new ColdSpringProperty.cfc. Special thanks to Jorge Loyo for commiting the inital version of this wiki entry. Jorge is definitely a MachStar!

0 Trackbacks | Announcements, Mach-II 1.6 | Send
Posted 1/8/09 @ 3:30 PM by Peter J. Farrell

Mach-II 1.6 RC2 Released - We're Almost There!

Team Mach-II is happy to announce the release of Mach-II 1.6.0 RC2 This is our last stop (I promise) on the road to the stable release of Mach-II 1.6. We plan to release 1.6 as a stable before the start of February. Development of code for Mach-II 1.8 "Simplicity" is heavily under way with many exciting features already in the code base and documented on the wiki.

The RC2 incorporates fixes and improvements from just 2 tickets. All the changes had to do with the new caching package. If you haven't checked out Mach-II 1.6, read our What's New in Mach-II 1.6 - A Quickstart for Current Mach-II Developers. If you've been using the Beta or RC1 release, we've developed a wiki entry that details any changes to that were incorporated into the framework during the Beta period - so read our Changes During the Beta document for detailed information.

If you find any inconsistencies or bugs in the RC2, please check the current reported defects first and then file a bug report. Your input is greatly appreciated and become MachStar.

Go grab Mach-II 1.6 RC2 now and happy Mach-II-ing!

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Posted 1/5/09 @ 12:15 PM by Peter J. Farrell

Mach-II Updates

Happy New Year from Team Mach-II! We wanted to give everyone a few quick updates and we'll have much more to say about Mach-II in the coming weeks.

Mach-II 1.6 RC2 will be out any day. This release fixes a couple of minor bugs with caching (thanks to Derrick Jackson for pointing these out!) and a few other minor issues. Based on reports we've received about RC1 it's rock solid so RC2 will likely be the final release.
Mach-II 1.6 final will be out later this month!
The updated final Mach-II 1.6 skeleton will be available very shortly (possibly even today).
We're already hard at work on Mach-II 1.8 and will have information on the features we have planned for 1.8 very soon.
The Mach-II dashboard is coming along nicely and we're getting great feedback and suggestions on it, so look for more information about that very soon.
We did a "10 Questions About Mach-II" article for SitePoint quite some time ago, but since it's been delayed in getting published we'll have that for everyone on the Mach-II blog next week. It has some great information about who's using Mach-II that we think you'll find interesting.

As always if you have comments, questions, concerns, feature suggestions, etc. please email us at team at mach-ii dot com, or for feature requests please post those on the Mach-II Trac site.

Looking forward towards a great 2009 with Mach-II!

Announcements, Mach-II 1.6 | Send
Posted 1/2/09 @ 9:29 AM by Matt Woodward

Mach-II 1.6.0 RC1 Released

Team Mach-II is happy to announce the release of Mach-II 1.6.0 RC1. This is our last stop on the road to the stable release of Mach-II 1.6. We plan to release 1.6 as a stable in the coming weeks.

The RC1 incorporates fixes and improvements from over 30 tickets. Most changes had to do with the new caching and logging packages. If you haven't checked out Mach-II 1.6, read our What's New in Mach-II 1.6 - A Quickstart for Current Mach-II Developers. If you've been using the Beta release, we've developed a wiki entry that details any changes to that were incorporated into the framework during the Beta period - so read our Changes During the Beta document for detailed information.

If you find any inconsistencies or bugs in the RC1, please check the current reported defects first and then file a bug report. Your input is greatly appreciated and become MachStar.

As for future development, new Mach-II Specification and Feedback Process (M2SFP) documents will be drafted for enhancements and improvements we are planning for Mach-II 1.8. Stay tuned for more details soon.

Go grab Mach-II 1.6 RC1 now and happy Mach-II-ing!

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Posted 11/9/08 @ 12:30 PM by Peter J. Farrell