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(displaying entries 11 - 20)

We've Added a Bug Tracker and Have a New SVN URL

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Exciting times around here as we have improved our infrastructure for the project.  The newest addition to our infrastructure is that our Subversion repository has moved to a managed host - CVSDude.  This has allowed us to integrate a Trac installation for Mach-II and give us a roadmap, wiki and bug tracking capabilities.  From now on, our bug tracker is publicly available.

Although not all of us on Team Mach-II think the best things about wikis, we have enabled a wiki for Mach-II on our Trac installation.  Currently, there are some FAQs that I imported from the somewhat out of date FAQs PDF.  So if you want to help us, please feel free to help with documenation on the wiki.

Visit our Mach-II Project Bug Tracker and Wiki

The new SVN url is http://greatbiztoolsllc-svn.cvsdude.com/mach-ii/

Special thanks to GreatBizTools, LLC - the principal commercial entity supporting Mach-II - for providing us with our SVN and Trac infrastructure.

Mach-II 1.6 Development Started & Small Updates

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Just wanted to let everybody know that we've started a new directory in our Subversion repository for development of Mach-II 1.6.  Point your favorite SVN client if you wish to use the BER here:

http://greatbiztoolsllc-svn.cvsdude.com/mach-ii/framework/1-6-0/trunk/

Also, a friendly reminder that nightly zips of the BER are available.  Ok, they are not so nightly at this point, but when significant features or enhancements are checked in we'll (manually) generate a nightly build.  The build, zip and ftp is already handled by our ANT build file, I just haven't found the time to add a cron task.  Nightlies are available as a ZIP from our nightly build directory:

http://www.mach-ii.com/nightly/

Also, I'm working on a new application skeleton for Mach-II 1.5. Not a lot has changed except for the addition of a few xml commands in the configuration file and a couple new "suggested" directories.  I hope to release a new version in the near future as I've gotten a few emails about this already.  FYI, the 1.1.1 skeleton works just fine with Mach-II 1.5.

Lastly, we're working on more documentation for Mach-II.  Just wanted to thank Brian Meloche who recently contacted me about writing some documentation for the framework.  He even included a sample technical writing sample for review.  Brian is a big user of Mach-II and promotes it heavily at the company he works at. We'll update the resources page as new documentation is updated or created and I'll be sure to leave a note on this blog as notification.

New Documentation Available for BuildUrl(), SES URLs and <redirect> command

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I just finished typing out a draft of the Mach-II URL Management Enhancements documentation.  It's a very rough draft at this point, but I hope it covers some of the questions that have been coming up on the Google Group.  If you're intested in learning how to use the new BuildUrl() method, SES URLs and the improvements to the <redirect> command, this is the documentation to read.

cf.Objective() 2008 Pre-Conference Mach-II Workshops!

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Team Mach-II™ is offering new pre-conference workshops that help developers learn how to apply object-oriented programming fundamentals by using the Mach-II framework. Participants may choose one of the following workshop options:

•  2-Day Workshop (April 30 - May 1) for developers who want to enhance their knowledge about object-oriented programming and learn how to build applications with Mach-II (total of 14 hours of training time)
• 1-Day Workshop (May 1) for developers who already understand object-oriented programming techniques but want to build better applications with Mach-II (total of 7 hours of training time)

Workshop Facilitators

The following workshop facilitators, who actually wrote the Mach-II code, not only can explain the fundamental design principles behind Mach-II but can also show developers practical ways to help them get the most out of their ColdFusion applications: Peter J. Farrell, Kurt Wiersma, Matt Woodward.

Objectives of April 30 Workshop – Object-Oriented Programming with Mach-II

•  Enhance knowledge about object-oriented (OO) programming.
•  Learn CFC best practices.
• Explore common design patterns (e.g., beans, data access objects, services, facades).
• Apply OO concepts and design patterns in ColdFusion constructs.
• Discover how the model-view-controller pattern (MVC) is implemented in Mach-II.
• Understand how applications break into events.

Objectives of May 1 Workshop – Building Enterprise-Level Applications with Mach-II

•  Build flexible applications by using filters, plugins, properties, and subroutines.
• Discover the art of using object-orient analysis and design (OOAD).
• Implement ColdSpring into Mach-II applications and modules.
• Build enterprise-level applications by using Mach-II modules, includes, and caching.
• Learn strategies for migrating legacy applications to OO and Mach-II.
• Find out where technologies like AJAX, Flex, ORMs, and web services fit into your applications.

Price of Workshops and Discounts

Workshops	Early Bird Special! Register by 01/15/08 and get these discounts!	Regular price If you register between 01/16/08 and 04/04/08
2-Day Workshop April 30 - May 1, 2008	$760 15% discount - save $135	$895
1-Day Workshop May 1, 2008	$445 10% discount - save $50	$495

Register for Workshops Now

Registration is through cf.Objective() and Best Meetings

For more information, visit our training page.

Mach-II 1.5 Final Released

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The Mach-II team and GreatBizTools, LLC are pleased to announce the final release of Mach-II Version 1.5. Mach-II 1.5 has been available as a beta for several months, and as a release candidate since August 14, 2007. Numerous large-scale applications have been running on Mach-II 1.5 since its beta release and given the feedback we have received from beta users, we are confident that Mach-II 1.5 is ready for production use in all Mach-II applications.

Backwards Compatibility

Mach-II 1.5 is fully backwards-compatible with earlier versions of Mach-II. We have not received any reports of compatibility issues with existing Mach-II applications running on versions of Mach-II 1.5.

New Features

Mach-II 1.5 has numerous new features that are summarized below. For additional information on these features, please see "What's New in Mach-II 1.5: A Quick Start for Current Mach-II Developers."

• XML Includes
  • Mach-II 1.5 now allows the inclusion of additional XML files in the main mach-ii.xml configuration file. This is accomplished through a simple <include> directive in the XML file.
• Modules
  • Modules can be used to create sub- and peer-applications, or to easily integrate third-party functionality within Mach-II applications.
• Subroutines
  • Subroutines allow for inline, immediate execution of "snippets" of XML. This allows for more granular reuse of and reduces redundancy in the XML, and is extremely handy for things such as executing layouts that previously required a new event announcement.
• New Mach-II Property Datatype Support
  • Mach-II 1.5 introduces the ability to declare structs and arrays as properties in the mach-ii.xml configuration file.
  • Mach-II 1.5 introduces support for using CFCs as Mach-II properties through the new Property.cfc framework object, which previously required the use of the configure() method in a plugin to ensure the CFCs were placed in the Mach-II property manager when the application initialized.
• <event-bean> Command Enhancements
  • New optional reinit parameter allows for reinitialization of beans as opposed to pulling a populated bean from the event object. This is useful in error situations when, for example, you want to use an empty bean on the initial load of a form page, but if validation fails on the server side, you want to repopulate the form with the data contained in the bean that was populated by the event-bean command.
• <redirect> Command Enhancements
  • The <redirect> command now supports the persistence of complex objects across redirects, which previously required the use of a filter/plugin combination.
  • The <redirect> command now supports HTTP statuses 301 (moved permanently) and 303 (post redirect get, a.k.a. "PRG") in addition to 302 (moved temporarily). HTTP status 302 was previously the only status announced with the <redirect> command because this is the default behavior for <cflocation>.
• New URL Management Features
  • Mach-II 1.5 introduces two new methods, BuildUrl() and BuildUrlToModule(), that allow for highly configurable control over URL formatting. These methods make the syntax for URLs within Mach-II applications much more compact, and also enable the creation of SES/friendly URLs
• Bindable Property Placeholder Support with Parameters
  • Dynamic properties can be bound to specific values in the XML configuration file through the use of common data binding syntax, e.g. {$property}. One example of the use of bindable properties is in the deployment of an application to different servers that require server-specific parameters, such as when running an application on development, staging, and production servers.
• Numerous bug fixes and other enhancements.
  • Improved initial application load time by approximately 10%.
  • Enhanced TracePlugin functionality.
  • See changelog in the framework core download for additional information on bug fixes.

Resources

To learn more about Mach-II 1.5, please refer to the following resources:

• Download Mach-II 1.5
• What's New in Mach-II 1.5: A Quick Start for Current Mach-II Developers
• The Team Mach-II Blog
• Register for Mach-II Training

Framework Download Permalinks

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Kyle Hayes, our Corporate Evangelist / Designer, recently asked me if there was an easy way to always get the latest and greatest builds of Mach-II (i.e. a permalink).  So, here they are:

• Latest Stable Version
• Latest Development Version

Also, as I mentioned in my recent post about the addtion of ANT to Mach-II, there are now nightly builds of the framework available for all of those who do not use Subversion or want to us it.  Check out http://www.mach-ii.com/nightly for all the latest and greatest!

Nightly Builds and Duck Typing

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I've been on an ANT kick lately and tonight I decided to whip up a build file for Mach-II.  A couple things came of this...

1. The ability to do nightly builds of the framework for everybody that does not want to use a bleeding edge release from SVN.  While they probably won't be nightly at the moment, the latest nightly builds can be found at http://www.mach-ii.com/nightly/
2. The ability to create duck typed cores of the framework for production systems.  The ANT build file right now has a 'buildDuckTyped' target which will create a duck typed build for you by regexing the right stuff out of a typed core.  When Mach-II 1.5 goes stable, I suspect we will offer a duck typed core.  I haven't checked on what the speed improvments would be, but I would be curious for those who do load testing extensively.  Let us know if you want to do this testing for us.
3. I've also been experimenting with Selenium Remote Control (UI functional testing) in addition to CFCUnit at my day job.  We have test harness application and I would like to create Selenium tests that would verify all of the test cases we have created.  There are many things that are easier to test by running a request through CF and much easier than creating CFCUnit test cases for the framework (anybody want to do this?).  So I can see use moving toward better testing of the framework through Selenium and CFCUnit when we start working on Mach-II 1.6.

Mach-II 1.5 RC1 Released

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The Mach II team is proud to announce that Mach II 1.5 has reached release candidate status. Several enhancements and bug fixes have made it into RC1. The biggest change is that you can now use relative paths when using either the new include feature or when referencing a module include file. The plan is to have folks play around, I mean test out, RC1 in anticipation of a final release before MAX in October.

The Mach II team has also been working on Mach II 1.6. We have been working on a proof of concept for a new caching feature as well as a dashboard to make managing the the new cache and selectively reloading parts of your application easier. As you can see our goal with 1.6 is provide some of the most requested features by the Mach II community. The team has also started to brainstorm for 2.0 which we think will have some very exciting features that 1.5 and 1.6 will have laid the ground work for.

CFC Documentation for Mach-II Now Available!

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In our efforts to make the Mach-II framework even more accessible to developers, we have now published documentation for all CFCs that make up framework using the CFC.Doc tool created by Phil Cruz.  Using this tool, we have generated "Javadoc" style API documentation for the Mach-II 1.5 Beta1 release.  We would like to extend a big thank you to Phil for donating a license to the Mach-II project.  Take a look (and bookmark!) the docs:

Mach-II 1.5 Beta 1

• http://www.mach-ii.com/cfcdocs/1-5-0/
• http://www.mach-ii.com/cfcdocs/1-5-0/index_frames.html (frames version)
• http://www.mach-ii.com/cfcdocs/1-5-0/Mach-II_1-5-0_Beta1_CFCDoc.pdf (pdf)

Mach-II 1.1.1 Stable

• http://www.mach-ii.com/cfcdocs/1-1-1/
• http://www.mach-ii.com/cfcdocs/1-1-1/index_frames.html (frames version)
• http://www.mach-ii.com/cfcdocs/1-1-1/Mach-II_1-1-1_CFCDoc.pdf (pdf)

GreatBizTools to Support Mach-II

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GreatBizTools, LLC (GBT) has recently purchased the copyright to the Mach-II framework from Ben Edwards, Inc.  This purchase will allow for the continued growth and development of Mach-II as one of the premier frameworks for ColdFusion applications.  Essentially, this marks the beginning of the "second generation" of Mach-II and creates a new foundation for expanding the framework.

As the principal commercial entity supporting Mach-II, GBT is dedicated to the principles of the open-source movement.  Specializing in designing and implementing human resource management systems, the company will be promoting the use of Mach-II for developing sophisticated, enterprise-level applications.  GBT will provide the necessary infrastructure and formal channels for delivering a more comprehensive and effective product to organizations wishing to improve the quality and efficiency of their web-based applications.

GBT's primary goal is to make the framework more transparent and open to the community of users.  Plans are underway over the next several months to achieve the following objectives regarding the Mach-II project:

• Develop an introductory Mach-II training program with a focus on object-oriented programming
• Develop an advanced Mach-II training program
• Release core framework CFC documentation
• Update and create special documentation as needed
• Continue releasing development roadmaps
• Launch a public bug tracking system
• Improve the process for users to provide feedback to the Mach-II team
• Extend and enhance the Mach-II framework through continued releases
• Develop a technical support program and offer technical support to users

GreatBizTools pledges to keep Mach-II an open-source project.  In addition, GBT intends to provide resources to the Mach-II team for developing better documentation and training for Mach-II developers.

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