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Mach-II Glimpses: What We're Up To Lately!

I thought it would be cool to let you know what the Team has been up to lately.  We're glad to welcome Adrian Scott to Team Mach-II.  His bio, photo and complete list of life ambitions are forth coming. Welcome Adrian -- we are happy to have you!

Kurt

• "Pretty much completely rewrote the event-bean command" because of all the new stuff!"
• "I started a nice unit test [with MxUnit] that throughly tests all the new code in event-bean."

Rock on Kurt! Keep cookin' on that code.  Kurt is an un-sung programming powerhouse on Team Mach-II. He deserves more credit than he publicly gets.

Adrian

• "Planning out a series of beginner M2 tutorials. They'll be a pretty sweet resource."

Way to hit the ground running Adrian!

Peter

• "Writing documentation for the view tag library and the loop criterion attribute of cache-clear."
• "Building out some tools for the tools tab of the dashboard. RegEx tester and scribble page tools are forthcoming."
• "Coordinating on the last 10 tickets of over 180 tickets filed for 1.8 Simplicity."

Feels kinda strange commenting on myself, but consider myself colored busy this Fall.

Matt

• Attending SpringOne2GX: "Brain already going a mile a minute and that's only from the opening keynote."

I'm sure Matt will be back with even more Mach-II vision ideas.  We're really research new stuff for 1.9 and 2.0!

Brian

• "Working on some more Mach-II QuickStart screencasts."

Brian has done three great screencasts be sure to check the latest (as of the date of this blog post): Introduction to Mach-II events Part Two http://bit.ly/mCdVJ

Well, that's the quick update for this week.  More to come soon.

Mach-II Dashboard 1.0 Reaches RC1 and Released

Team Mach-II is happy to announce that the Mach-II Dashboard 1.0 has reached the status of Release Candidate 1 status.  This means that we are becoming closer to releasing a stable zip of the Dashboard.

The Mach-II Dashboard is a Mach-II module that is designed to assist developers create and manage the development of applications. The Dashboard requires Mach-II 1.6 or higher.  Check out the Dashboard wiki for screenshots and a complete list of features.

There was one significant addition that was added to the Dashboard during the Beta release. A new property called 'enableLogin' (which is true by default) allows you to disable the login / authentication page if you want.  If you are using the Mach-II 1.8 BER, you can enable / disable the login page by environment name or environment group (you can read more about how to configure the 'enableLogin' property).

Without further ado, please take a moment to download the Mach-II Dashboard RC1 zip now.

Making Mach-II development a snap -- download the Dashboard

The dashboard beta is here! Kurt and I worked on the alpha pretty hard over the past few months and think that we've build a pretty handy development tool. A bunch of functionality is available to help you build Mach-II application faster to build and easier to maintain while deployed to production.  It's a quick list of what the dashboard can do for you:

• Basic authentication (login page)
• Reload base application or individual modules
• Reload base ColdSpring bean factory or individual child factories
• Manage logging include changing logging levels
• Manage caching including charts of logging statistics
• Recent exception snapshots for easy debugging
• Basic server and application configuration information
• JVM memory usage including charts of memory usage
• Reload individual listeners, plugins, filters or properties (when using Mach-II 1.8 BER only)

Remember this is at an beta version and might be a few bugs along the way.  Check out the  Dashboard Home for screenshots and additional information.

By the way, the Dashboard requires our latest stable release - Mach-II 1.6.0 or try it with Mach-II 1.8 for event more features.

How to Install

1. Download the dashboard code from http://www.mach-ii.com.

2. Unzip the dashboard to your web root.
   1. For example, on Windows the default web root is [DRIVE]:\Inetpub\wwwroot, or if you are using your CFML server's built-in web server, your web root is likely [DRIVE]:\CFusionMX\wwwroot. If you are on a Unix system, your web root will vary.
   2. The end result of this step is that you should have the directory MachIIDashboard (no hyphen) in your web root. Inside this directory you will find the dashboard files.
   3. If you wish to place the core Mach-II Dashboard files in a location that is different from your webroot, just create a mapping called MachIIDashboard in the CFML administrator / control panel that points this mapping to the location where you placed the dashboard files.

3. Add the dashboard as a module in your Mach-II application configuration file and set the password in the override XML section:

   <modules>
      <module name="dashboard" file="/MachIIDashboard/config/mach-ii_dashboard.xml">
         <mach-ii>
            <properties>
               <property name="password" value="PLACE YOUR PASSWORD HERE" />
            </properties>
         </mach-ii>
      </module>
   </modules>

4. Reload your Mach-II application and navigate to:

   http://www.example.com/index.cfm?event=dashboard:info.index

(You may have to modify this url if you use a different event parameter other than "event")

Mach-II Dashboard Updated

Kurt and I have been working on the new Mach-II Dashboard which we released into an alpha a week or so ago. We've released several nightly zips since then, but wanted to blog again since we've improved the look and feel of the dashboard and added in a basic login page so it can be deployed on production system.  One of the improvements is the addition of charts for the caching stats on the cache page. We're working on getting information about the CFML server memory use and a debugging page that will offer recent snapshots of exceptions which will help developers see recent errors in real time on a production application without downloading and searching through logs files.  I'm sure this will help those pesky errors that people call you about.