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Mach-II Integrity (1.9) - Milestone 1 Released
Team Mach-II is proud to release Milestone 1 for Mach-II "Integrity" (1.9). We have moved to a milestone release cycle instead of a massive beta at the end of our development period. Each milestone will include several small features or improvements. We release milestones when they have a reached "beta" quality and are ready for the less adventurous Mach-IIers to test.
- Boostrapper "loading page" option - #195
- Add 'prepend' attribute to the view-page command - #420
- Improvements to the logging package
- Improvements to the HtmlHelperProperty
- Miscellaneous improvements
For more information see our What's New in Mach-II 1.9 document.
Download Mach-II Integrity Milestone 1 now.
Mach-II Meetup at Brit's Pub - Thursday, April 22nd - 8pm at cf.Objective()
Team Mach-II has organized a Mach-II Meetup at cf.Objective. If you are attending the conference, this is a great opportunity to meetup with other Mach-IIers, exchange ideas and meet some members of Team Mach-II. We love these kind of informal gatherings as this is where we find out how the community feels about the project and where you can influence new features for future versions of Mach-II.
When: Thursday, April 22nd 2010 - 8:00pm - ends whenever
Where: Brit's Pub (two block north of the Hyatt)
From 10pm to 11pm is Brit's Late night Happy Hour. Which means a great selection of beers @ $4 and all starters @ $5.95. If you want more info, check out the Happy Hour deals.
If you are attending, please leave a comment on this post. We might be able to get reserved place if we have a large enough group.
My mean boss directed me to make this legal disclaimer: This is an informal meetup and in no way is Mach-II (members, agents or sponsors) or cf.Objective() responsible for your behavior, actions or troubles. Attend at your own risk.
Mach-II 1.9
Hot on the heels of the Mach-II 1.8 "Simplicity" final release, Team Mach-II is proud to announce the availability of Milestone 1 (M1) of the 1.9 "Integrity" release.
As we've mentioned a few times before, starting with Mach-II 1.9 we are moving to milestone releases in order to get fully completed features in your hands as soon as possible. This helps us better organize and complete the development tasks involved with the release, and our users can help us by testing the new features as they're completed instead of waiting for the full final release, or potentially having numerous partially completed features in nightly builds.
Mach-II 1.9 is code-named "Integrity" because one of the main focal points of this release is adding validation capabilities to the framework. An integral part of validation is internationalization, so i18n is another big piece of Mach-II 1.9. We've made great progress on these features and they'll be available in future milestone releases. You can read about some of our plans for i18n features on the Mach-II wiki.
In keeping with our smaller, faster release cycle, we started with some low-hanging fruit for Mach-II 1.9 M1, including:
- Boostrapper "loading page" option - #195
- Add 'prepend' attribute to the view-page command - #420
- Improvements to the logging package
- Improvements to the HtmlHelperProperty
- Miscellaneous improvements
Grab the Mach-II 1.9 M1 zip now and help us by starting to incorporate new Mach-II features into your development cycle right when they're available.
As for our plans for future 1.9 milestone releases, we're a completely open book. You can read about all the milestone plans on our roadmap, and please let us know if you have feedback on any of the great features we have planned for 1.9. And we can't wait to start sharing our plans for 2.0.
As always, thanks for your support of Mach-II! Our users and community are what make Mach-II great, so we truly appreciate everything you do for Mach-II.
Mach-II Simplicity (1.8) Released
Team Mach-II is proud to announce the availability of the stable / gold version of Mach-II 1Simplicity (1.8). Simplicity introduces numerous new features and also sets the stage for us to move forward to 1.9 code named "Integrity" and the big 2.0 release code named "Velocity".
New features and enhancements in Mach-II Simplicity (1.8) include:
- Form Tag Library with data binding
- View Tag Library
- Environment Property
- HTML Helper Property
- View Loaders
- Call-Method Command
- Enhanced Redirect Functionality
- Search Engine Friendly URL Enhancements including support for URL Routes
- Enhanced event-bean command
In addition to these "marquee" features, Mach-II 1.8 includes a ton of smaller improvements that will make building Mach-II applications even faster and easier than before, so make sure and check out the "What's New in Mach-II 1.8" page on the wiki for all the details.
Mach II CFObjective 2010 Pre-conference Training
Team Mach II is happy to present Pre-conference training on April 20-21, 2010 just before CFObjective 2010 in Minneapolis, MN!
Team Mach-II is offering a two-day pre-conference workshop that helps developers learn how to build rock-solid object-oriented CFML applications using the Mach-II framework. This workshop is ideal for CFML developers who want to take their development skills to the next level by using object-oriented techniques and the power of Mach-II.
This two-day workshop includes a total of 14 hours of training time, not including breaks and lunch.
We have made a number of improvements to the workshop since we first offered it two years ago at cf.Objective() 2008. The presentations have been streamlined in order to allow for maximum hands-on coding, and we dig into the latest features introduced in Mach-II 1.8 ("Simplicity") as well as new features in Mach-II 1.9 ("Integrity").
In addition, this year each participant is provided a lab computer with all software and hands-on labs pre-installed. At the end of the workshop all materials will be provided on a thumb drive so participants can take their work with them.
And the best news is that we have reduced the price of the workshop by 45%! This year the price tag is only $495, a whopping $400 less than what we charged two years ago. We are trying to make it as easy as possible for you to attend this workshop.
You can find more detailed information on CFObjective website. You can find registration information for the workshop and the conference here.In additional, the team will also be organizing a meet-up for fans and users of Mach II one of the nights during the conference. Stay tune to this blog and the Mach II mailing list for more information.
Mach-II Simplicity (1.8) RC2 Released!
Team Mach-II is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Mach-II 1.8 RC2. Download Mach-II 1.8 RC2 now. RC2 fixes a few user reported edge case issues. After the RC2 public testing period, Mach-II Simplicity will be deemed gold and ready for a stable release. Now it the time to test out 1.8.0 on your applications!
Mach-II 1.8 introduces numerous new features and also sets the stage for us to move forward to 1.9 code named "Integrity" and the big 2.0 release code named "Velocity".
New features and enhancements in Mach-II Simplicity (1.8) include:
- Form Tag Library with data binding
- View Tag Library
- Environment Property
- HTML Helper Property
- View Loaders
- Call-Method Command
- Enhanced Redirect Functionality
- Search Engine Friendly URL Enhancements including support for URL Routes
- Enhanced event-bean command
In addition to these "marquee" features, Mach-II 1.8 includes a ton of smaller improvements that will make building Mach-II applications even faster and easier than before, so make sure and check out the "What's New in Mach-II 1.8" page on the wiki for all the details.
Team Mach-II: Introducing Mike Rogers
Team Mach-II is glad to welcome our new member Mike Rogers to the team (see bio). Below is a short interview we did with him. We felt this would be a good way for the community to "virtually" meet him. We're really excited to work with Mike and feel he's a great asset to the Mach-II community. Without further ado, on with the interview:
Tell us a little about who you are and what makes you tick...
The first question and it's the hardest. Who am I? I'm a marginally talented programmer from a small town in Indiana whose desire to write solid software has taken him through a dozen languages and countless frameworks only to settle on Mach-II. I'm driven by (as the great Larry Wall once said) a combination of Laziness, Hubris, and Impatience.
What was the first thing you ever did with a computer that made you proud of your accomplishment?
When I was very young, maybe 8 years old, I wrote a baseball game in Q-BASIC. I remember showing my dad and getting him to say 'wow'. That was pretty fantastic. That was back in DOS 4.0, when real men used edlin.exe to modify config files.
What got you started using Mach-II?
I had just been hired into a ColdFusion environment coming out of a Java shop whose process I had built from the ground up to include Spring, Hibernate, Axis2, some unit testing and CruiseControl -- not too rigorous, but there was some structure. The shop I had hired into was using straight ColdFusion with no process, no framework, nothing. I needed more structure, so I started looking at frameworks. Mach-II was the cleanest, most efficient framework I could find. For the first time since Java I felt like my code was making sense, and that was a good feeling.
Mach-II has matured a lot since its inception. What are your favorite Mach-II features as of today?
I really like its integration with ColdSpring; the logging framework is also pretty spiffy. I hope to play more with that as time passes. The form taglib is also quite sweet; it's saved me a bunch of time with a few projects at work.
Everybody brings unique ideas and skills to the table. What one thing you feel you bring to Team Mach-II?
It's a bit too early to tell; my official contributions have been minimal. Unofficially my fondness for bourbon brings a certain drunken confidence that I feel the team was lacking prior to my arrival, though the merits thereof are open to debate. My hope is that if I revisit this question even within the next few months I'll have a better understanding of how I fit in.
Alternatively, I bring the beard.
It's an impossibility to spend 100% in front of a keyboard. What do you do for fun?
I work on my little farm, cook, and spend time with my wife. On our farm we have a horse, two goats, a pig, seven cats, three dogs and a flock of chickens. One of my favorite dishes to cook is french onion soup; it makes the house smell amazing.
If you were not a programmer, what would you want to do with your life?
A scenario too horrible to contemplate! Although I think I'd be a pretty passable Calculus teacher, or some other job with a high nerd factor.
Mach-II 1.8 Release Candidate Available
Team Mach-II (which is now six people strong!) is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Mach-II 1.8 RC1. Download Mach-II 1.8 RC1 now.
Mach-II 1.8 introduces numerous new features and also sets the stage for us to move forward to 1.9 code named "Integrity" and the big 2.0 release code named "Velocity".
New features and enhancements include:
- Form Tag Library with data binding
- View Tag Library
- Environment Property
- HTML Helper Property
- View Loaders
- Call-Method Command
- Enhanced Redirect Functionality
- Search Engine Friendly URL Enhancements including support for URL Routes
- Enhanced event-bean command
And there's the usual round of bug fixes and performance improvements of course. You can see the details in the CHANGELOG, but we do want to point out some highlights:
- Up to a 9500% (no, that's not a typo) improvement in load time on CFCs using the "depends" attribute. Not that application load time was terrible to begin with, but this really flies now. Thanks to Dave Shuck for bringing this issue up in the context of getting Mach-II running on Google App Engine, because not only does Mach-II 1.8 now run on GAE with no modifications, everyone benefits from the load time improvement. You can see Mach-II running on GAE here.
- Improvements to the Assert, SimplePatternMatcher, and AntPathMatcher CFCs
- Addition of buildUnescapedUrl() and buildUnescapedUrlToModule() functions for use with JavaScript or where unescaped URLs are required.
- URL creation routines now allow the event parameter to be empty. Great for SES URLs!
- The cache clear command now accepts a list or array to clear multiple cache elements. Thanks to Derrick Jackson for suggesting this enhancement.
- Full email configuration support in the email logger.
- The email logger can be set to only send email at specific log levels.
- Vastly reduced--in most cases eliminated--the amount of whitespace generated by Mach-II. Thanks to Doug Smith for working with us on this issue.
- Improved exception handling and error messages. See tickets 326, 331, 358, and 384 for details.
We'd particularly like to thank members of the Mach-II community who worked with us or even contributed patches to resolve bugs or improve features in Mach-II. (Apologies for the cases in which we have no last names.)
- Joel Cox (Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company)
- Brandon Culpepper (Direct Solutions International)
- Ty Delong (The Lampo Group)
- Joseph FitzGerald
- Chris Irwin (WolfNet Technologies)
- Derrick Jackson (US Senate Sergeant at Arms)
- Jayel
- Jonah (creori.com)
- Brian Klaas (Johns Hopkins University - Bloomberg School of Public Health)
- Jorge Loyo
- Brian Pickens (Forum Communications Company)
- Zack Pitts
- Mike Rogers (now a Team Mach-II member!)
- Adrian Scott (Allura Direct, and now a Team Mach-II member!)
- Shaun (Net Grow)
- Dave Shuck
- Dan Skaggs
- Doug Smith (The Lampo Group)
- Eli Tapolcsanyi (The Lampo Group)
- Phil Thomas (The Lampo Group)
- Jason York (The Lampo Group)
I know we're overlooking some folks and for that we apologize. We've seen a big increase in the size and participation levels in the Mach-II community over the past few months, and we thank our entire community for all their contributions. From answering a question on the mailing list, to contributing to the wiki, to hunting down bugs and contributing patches, every contribution regardless of size or type helps make Mach-II better. This is what open source is all about.
So go forth and download! [zip link here] Mach-II 1.8 is a fantastic release in terms of new features and enhancements, but even more important to us is the fact that this release has the most community participation of any release to date. Thanks again to our community. Let's keep that ball rolling!
Mach-II Runs on Google App Engine with Open BlueDragon
Those of you following the Open BlueDragon project know that there's some great work going on with OpenBD on Google App Engine. If you're not familiar with Google App Engine it's a really simple way to deploy applications written in either Python, Java, or now CFML, onto Google's cloud.
Dave Shuck recently contacted us and pointed out that due to some of the restrictions on Google App Engine, the "depends" attribute doesn't work. This is because up until now, the way "depends" worked was to inject methods into CFCs, write a modified version of the CFC to disk, and then instantiate the modified CFC from disk.
Since this was a no go on GAE, Peter looked into other ways of solving this problem. What he came up with is not only slick, but in the isolation test Peter created it garners a 9500% speed improvement (no, that's not a typo) over the old way of doing things. Note that "depends" only comes into play at load time, but shortening the load time in such a dramatic way means faster development for you. You can see details of the changes in ticket 456.
With the new "depends" functionality in place Mach-II 1.8 now runs great on Google App Engine with no changes to Mach-II itself, as you can see in Dave Shuck's test application on GAE.
Thanks to Dave for bringing this to our attention and for pushing the envelope with CFML on GAE. Having Mach-II running on GAE is fantastic, and the speed improvements it led to aren't bad either!
This Week in Mach-II: Loggers and Modules
Yet another week of great blog post posts from our wonderfully smart and talented community. I believe I owe Mike a round of bourbon after he gets done with the custom logger series and Brian gets something - I don't know what he drinks.
Building a Custom Logger Series
New Team Mach-II memember, Mike Rogers, has started an in-depth series of blog posts on building an IRC logger using Mach-II's logging package. Mike, I raise a tumbler to you.
Mach-II Deployment with Apache Ant
Mike Rogers on a roll and talks about Mach-II and deployement with ANT.
Using CKEditor with Mach-II and JQuery
Yet another Mike Rogers post where he discusses using the Mach-II form library, CKEditor and JQuery.
Mach-II and Module Config Files
Brian Klaas's second post in a series on his thoughts and methodology of building Mach-II modules.
Posted 11/18/09 @ 7:39 AM by Peter J. Farrell
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