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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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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
This Week in Mach-II: A list of great blog posts by Mach-II users
It's been a busy week of blog posts about Mach-II so we thought we'd share you some great information on using Mach-II. (Psst, Brian, Mike, Eric -- we'd love to get some of your amazing work onto the wiki).
A Brief Series on Mach-II Modules
Brian Klaas has been doing lot of work with modules in Mach-II in the past couple months. He is starting a series on some of the stumbling blocks he encountered.
http://tinyurl.com/yf8ar4j
We'll be sure to post when Brian series adds more installments. (No pressure Brian ;-)
A Short Chronicle on Using Event-Beans and Transfer
With plethora of new Mach-II posts, Mike Rogers blogs a trilogy of posts on using Mach-II event-bean and Transfer objects.
http://tinyurl.com/yawtvqj
http://tinyurl.com/ylluh9h
http://tinyurl.com/ykg7w9v
A Reminder on Using ResultArg and the Notify Command
Eric Cobb posts about a common mistake in using Mach-II using ResultArg and the notify command.
http://tinyurl.com/yanvhld
Posted 11/11/09 @ 7:30 AM by Peter J. Farrell
Looking for Help With Mach-II on Railo
One of our goals for Mach-II 1.9 is to officially support Railo, which we currently don't. If someone on the list is working with Mach-II on Railo and would like to help the project, we'd love your assistance. This would involve running any Mach-II apps you have on Railo, and the more features of Mach-II they exercise (caching, logging, plugins, filters, etc.) the better.
We don't anticipate any issues if you're running the latest version of Railo (there were some issues with older versions but they've been fixed in the later versions of Railo), but having someone who can be a "Railo ambassador" of sorts would be of great help to the project.
Since Railo is still a bit of a moving target (there have been some issues on and off for the past few months), having someone who can alert us early and often of any issues would be fantastic. If people aren't aware we also have a test harness, but nothing substitutes for real world apps being tested on the various engines.
If you're interested just respond to this message, or if you prefer you can contact us off-list at team at mach-ii dot com.
Posted 9/17/09 @ 3:17 PM by Peter J. Farrell
Thank You Community!
We're getting ready in the next couple of weeks to release Mach-II Simplicity (1.8) - Release Candidate 1 (RC1) into the world. I spend a while tonight updating the README file that will ship with the release and I compiled all the names from the tickets that were filed for 1.8 into this list. I'm sorry that there isn't enough time to go through a year's worth of Google Group list or wiki change list to find absolutely everybody -- so I'm falling back to the reporters in our ticket management system (Trac).
WOW, It's a much larger list than I expected / remembered. It goes to show all the little stuff that people contribute to the project really make a big difference in the grand scheme of things and how great the Mach-II community really is. The small amount of time spent on one contribution has exponential positive effects for the rest of the community. I'm glad people felt comfortable enough to dive in and participate in discussions / offer suggestions / provided patches / update the wiki / etc. The community has really grown into being empowered. You're the one of the reasons why Mach-II is a great place to be right now!
I'd like to personally extend a big thank you to everybody that has participated in our community -- from tickets to the wiki to the Google Group. Even a "right on" from people is great encouragement for us to continue -- every little bit helps. Thanks for being such a great community!
Excerpt from Mach-II Simplicity README:
Team Mach-II would like to send a special thanks to the following individuals that helped us produce Mach-II Simplicity by providing feedback, testing nightly / release candidate builds, test cases / application or finding defects (in no particular order):
- Doug Smith (The Lampo Group, Inc.)
- Eli Tapolcsanyi (The Lampo Group, Inc.)
- Ty Delong (The Lampo Group, Inc.)
- Phil Thomas (The Lampo Group, Inc.)
- Brandon Culpepper (Direct Solutions International, Inc.)
- Derrick Jackson (The United States Senate - Sergeant at Arms)
- Joel Cox (Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company)
- Chris Irwin (WolfNet Technologies)
- Adrian Scott (Allura Direct)
- Brian Klaas (Johns Hopkins University - Bloomberg School of Public Health)
- Brian Pickens (Forum Communications Company)
- Jonah (Creori)
- Dan Skaggs
- Jorge Loyo
- Zack Pitts
- Joseph FitzGerald
- Jayel (no last name given)
This list is by no means a complete list of people Team Mach-II would like to thank. If you participated by filing a defect, patch, enhancement and have been inadvertently left of this list, we're so sorry we forgot you. You're efforts have not been forgotten and please consider yourself thanked!
Great "Mach-II and ColdSpring for N00bs" Article by Ollie Jones
Ollie Jones has written up a great post on his blog entitled "Mach-II and ColdSpring for N00bs." It's excellent information, very thorough, and very well presented. He even includes a zip file of his basic setup that you can download.
Thanks Ollie! I'm sure this will be extremely useful to a ton of people starting to learn Mach-II and ColdSpring.
Great Example of How Our Users Help Mach-II
My former co-worker Brandon Culpepper (who is still one of the quickest studies I've ever had the pleasure working with) ran into a bit of a bizarre issue with Mach-II yesterday, and after hearing him describe it I was determined to get to the bottom of it.
The gist of the problem was that for some reason after a session timeout occurred, the application would throw a rather non-descript error along the lines of "Element {directory name} is undefined in a Java object of type class coldfusion.runtime.ApplicationScope," and a slightly different error in OpenBD. You can read the full details in the ticket.
Brandon described the issue to me in great detail over IM, but it was one of those things I had to run locally to really get my head around it, and he was nice enough to take the time to not only whittle the problem down to a very specific, repeatable test case, but he sent me two different test applications that had only the elements we needed to be able to repeat the error and figure out what was going on. This was no small amount of work on Brandon's part and was tremendously helpful in getting to the bottom of the issue.
Using these sample apps I was able to figure out that it didn't throw the error if the hyperlink or AJAX call involved was a Mach-II event as opposed to a plain old URL, and at that point I submitted the ticket because I knew Peter, as lead developer of Mach-II, would be able to diagnose things much more easily than I could.
So Peter jumped on the case and figured it out rather quickly. It turns out that this is a rather weird bug that goes back probably to Mach-II 1.1.1 and has to do with the way Mach-II has auto-generated the MACHII_APP_KEY property based on directory names. If you hit a .cfm file or remotely call a CFC in another directory, that will trigger a change in the app key property, and since the app key property changes, Mach-II will think it hasn't been loaded. Note that this only occurs if you don't explicitly set the application key (which I always do), and only reared its head with the introduction of the onSessionStart/End methods in the Application.cfc boostrapper.
Peter came up with a fix that's currently being tested, and he makes note of it in the ticket, but I'll test stick it here:
<cfparam name="MACHII_APP_KEY" type="string" default="#GetFileFromPath(GetDirectoryFromPath(GetCurrentTemplatePath()))#" />
Note that you can also explicitly set the MACHII_APP_KEY variable to your application name as opposed to relying on the directory name and this will also fix the problem:
So I wanted to take a moment to thank Brandon for notifying us of the bug and doing quite a bit of work to help us come to a quick rationale behind and resolution for the bug. Without the diagnosis and sample apps from Brandon this would have taken a lot longer to figure out, and due to his work all Mach-II users will benefit from Peter's fix to a bug that would likely bite others from time to time.
Another great open source success story. Thanks again Brandon!
Project Update - 5/28/2009
Good Day Mach-IIers! It's been a month since our last official project update, however some you heard a lot about Mach-II at our cf.Objective() sessions or if you came to our Brit's Pub Meetup at cf.Objective().
This Update's Special Thanks
We'd like to thanks a few people for contributing to the wiki in the past month. I apologize if you contributed and I didn't list your name specifically. Team Mach-II appreciates all the help. Your contributions are what makes Mach-II a great place to be!
- Jorge Loyo for creating a wiki entry on using the new copyToScope helper method in views
- Derrick Jackson for doing even more work on the Auto Update features for the dashboard
- MChambers, JJulien, rluijk and Gknight593 for their spelling and code corrections on the wiki
- Brian Klass for finding a problem with bindable property placeholders
- Doug Aragos for finding a backwards compatability problem with the new logger manager
Bravo! Thanks for all of your hard work. We couldn't do it without you!
Wiki Updates
There haven't been a whole ton of "big" wiki updates in the past month (because we've been busy on tickets and the conference). Here are few notable ones:- Brand new: Using copyToScope Helper Method in Views
- Updated with EL syntax examples for 1.8: XML Config File Reference
- Expanded documentation: Using the ColdSpringProperty
Mach-II Dashboard 1.0.0 Released
We never did blog about it, but the Mach-II Dashboard 1.0.0 went gold on May 12th and is ready for general use. Download the 1.0.0 version of the Mach-II dashboard now (links to zip file). Great thing is we're already working onf 1.1.0 so if you want to see new features in that be sure check out the nightly release (available from the code page).
Where is Mach-II "Simplicity" (1.8) Beta?
We've been working hard on the 1.8 alpha version and we are nearly feature complete. There has been almost 100 tickets filed for the 1.8 alpha milestone and there are just a few left to complete. Just wanted to thank those that helped put the alpha through it's paces and made it a better release even before we've gotten to a beta. This release really lives up to the name of "simplicity"! We hope to get simplicity into beta in the next couple of weeks.
On to Mach-II 1.9 - A Possible List of Features
Wow, we've not even reached a beta for 1.8 and we're already planning 1.9. If you are curious, here is a tentative list which may or may not be implemented in the end. We were just brainstorming:
- Packages (application helpers and sub-systems such as a configurable exception handling and decision system)
- Implement soft reference manager for timespan cache stategy - #70
- Provide mixins for views - #227
- Boostrapper loading page option - #195
- Improvements and new features in the tag libraries
- AJAX integration hooks and improved "co-existence" of AJAX
- RESTful URL support
Posted 5/28/09 @ 5:00 AM by Peter J. Farrell
A Warm Team Mach-II Welcome to Brian FitzGerald
Lately, we've been disussing on adding a couple new members to Team Mach-II in order to spread the work load out to more people as our ambitions grow for better documentation, tutorials and a more frequent release schedule.
We're happy to announce the addition of Brian FitzGerald to Team Mach-II as our Wiki Manager (although you'll probably see him doing more than just managing the wiki). If you've been on the wiki lately, you've noticed that Brian has spent a lot of time working on improving and adding new material to the wiki. For those who don't know him, here is a short bio of Brian:
Before shifting gears to earn an Associates of Audio Engineering, Brian FitzGerald completed a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Then, after a two year stint as a Multimedia Developer for Goelst USA specializing in client side Web technologies, Adobe Flash and the Creative Suite, he decided to focus on CFML. Since then, he has concentrated on Object Oriented architecture and design, specifically in the field of Educational Technology, as he works toward the release of a Spanish language learning platform due out early next year.
He and his wife Cinthia are both travel enthusiasts, and currently live in Greensboro, North Carolina.
We hope to see Brian making some post on the blog in the near future. We're glad to have you aboard Brian!
Posted 9/22/08 @ 2:15 PM by Peter J. Farrell
New Documentation: Using the Threading Adapter Package and Utility Connector
Just wanted to point out some of the new documentation that has been released on the Mach-II wiki.
Multi-threading is useful is specific circumstances and Mach-II utilizes it for a couple features introduced in version 1.6. However, threading implementations have slight variations between the various CFML servers. This is problematic when trying to implement features that can be multi-threaded and requires the ability to be deployed on a wide array of CFML servers include server versions that do not offer multi-threading capabilities. Use the Mach-II threading adapter package to abstract all the differences between CFML enginee and be worry free on writing multi-thread code.
The MachII.util.UtilityConnector is a helper component allows you leverage your already configured caching and logging subsystems within your model layer. Both the caching and logging packages are cross-cutting subsystems in the MVC stack and have been designed to be utilized outside of Mach-II's MVC architecture. Since these packages are agnostic from the Mach-II MVC layer, using them in your model layer does not create any coupling to the Mach-II MVC layer because you could remove the the Mach-II MVC layer from your application and load your logging and/or caching in another manner. Mach-II is using Mach-II specific loaders (MachII.logging.LoggingProperty and MachII.caching.CachingProperty) to load these packages in the context of Mach-II. Loading these packages outside of the context of Mach-II would amount to trivial code.
New Documentation: Introduction to Logging and Introduction to Caching
We've been working on getting the Mach-II community involved in using the wiki at trac.mach-ii.com which is the official home all Mach-II documenation, how-to's, primers, guides and FAQs. The community has created a bunch of new content and revised a lot of other entries as well over the past month. I wanted to point out a couple of great introductions that were recently added by Matt Williams.
Matt did a great job on these introductions which cover the new logging and caching packages that comprise some the major additions coming in Mach-II 1.6 which should be coming soon if you've been watching the Roadmap on Trac.
And don't fear the wiki! It's a collaborative workspace for people who have interest in and knowledge about Mach-II at all levels. We're extremely appreciative of any and all contributions to the Mach-II project so I'd like to thank Matt Williams for donating his time to the project and making it just a little bit better for everybody!
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