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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.
Mach-II Events Screencast
Another great screencast from Brian FitzGerald is available, this one entitled "Mach-II Events Part I." As you might guess it covers events in Mach-II, and Brian does a great job of getting at the heart of what events are and how they work within Mach-II. Be sure and check it out! (And given the name you can bet there will be a Part II ...)
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!
Mach-II screencasts, so easy a caveman could do it!
One of the great things about the Mach-II framework is just how easy it is to use.
I'm not just blowing smoke here - when I got started using Mach-II, I had never used an MVC framework before. Even still, it was just a matter of digging through some simple documentation on the wiki, asking a few questions on the Mach-II Google Group, and I was ready to rock.
BUT, to eliminate any possible barriers to giving Mach-II a try, we wanted to make the process of getting started even easier. For that reason, I'm pleased to announce "MachStart." MachStart will be a series of short, concise, Mach-II screencasts produced by Team Mach-II to prove just how easy it is to start building robust, flexible, maintainable applications with Mach-II.
Our first video (Installing Mach-II) is just over five minutes long, and is ready for you to check out. So if you've been waiting for the perfect time to give Mach-II a try, go ahead and check out the first MachStart screencast!
