Mach-II 1.8 Release Candidate Available

• 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.

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 can't thank our community enough for all the fantastic feedback and assistance they offer on the development of Mach-II. From questions on aspects of the framework that aren't as clear as they should be, to bug reports, to feature requests, to testing on real-world Mach-II applications, this is all vital to the continued progress and success of Mach-II. We couldn't do what we do without the active participation of our vibrant, smart community.

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)

Their assistance in hunting down and resolving bugs, or offering suggestions that improve existing features, improves Mach-II for everyone.

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!

 

Team Mach II is:

Peter Farrell

Matt Woodward

Kurt Wiersma

Brian FitzGerald

Adrian Scott

Mike Rogers