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Mach-II 1.6 Final Released!

Team Mach-II is very pleased to announce that Mach-II 1.6 final has been released! Since 1.6 has been available in alpha, beta, and release candidate form for a while, many people have already been using it in production and taking advantage of the great new features, but if you haven't checked out 1.6 yet, here's what you're missing:

  • Caching: an easy-to-use, granular caching layer that puts you in total control of what's cached, how it's cached, and how and when it's refreshed. Mach-II 1.6 ships with aCFML caching implementation, but the architecture is designed to allow for other implementations to such as ehcache or memcached to be used seamlessly by creating a simple adapter.
  • Logging: a full logging package that out of the box allows logging to screen, file, or email. The logging package adheres to the Apache Commons Logging levels (trace, debug, info, warn, error, fatal), and allows for different log actions to be taken based on the level of the message. For example, you can easily log a warn level to a file, but send error levels via email. As with the caching package, other implementations of logging can easily be added to Mach-II.
  • Publish/Subscribe Listener Notification: Rather than have redundant lists of listener calls in multiple event handlers, Mach-II 1.6 supports a publish/subscribe method of listener notification, whereby a single message broadcast can notify multiple listeners that have registered an interest in that message. Note that direct listener notification is still supported and may be preferable in many instances, but this is another option that may be used where it makes sense to do so.Multithreaded listener notifications are supported on ColdFusion 8. Multithreading may work fine on Open BlueDragon and Railo as well since they adhere to the CF 8 syntax for threading, but multithreading will be officially supported in Mach-II 1.8 or a post-1.6 maintenance release.
  • Improved Application.cfc Bootstrapper: The Application.cfc bootstrapper has been greatly simplified, with "smart defaults" in the mach-ii.cfc that the bootstrapper extends, meaning in many cases you will not have to manipulate Application.cfc at all. A new MACHII_ONLOAD_REQUEST_TIMEOUT attribute has also been added to give you control over the request timeout for the initial load of the application.
  • New ColdSpring Property: The ColdSpring plugin has been deprecated in favor of the new ColdSpring Property, which is maintained by the Mach-II team and offers greater functionality as compared with the plugin. New in Mach-II 1.6 is the new DEPENDS attribute of the CFCOMPONENT tag, which allows for the resolution of dependencies in listeners, filters, and plugins without writing setters or using constructor argument injection for the dependencies. The ColdSpring Property also allows ColdSpring-managed beans to be injected into the Mach-II Property Manager, making them available as Properties on the Mach-II side of your application.
  • Utility Connector: the Utility Connector allows you to easily extend Mach-II's caching and logging capabilities into the model/business logic layer of your application. Specifically, it does this by allowing the caching and logging layers to be used from withinColdSpring or another bean factory.
  • New Plugin Points: plugin points for onSessionStart and onSessionEnd have been added.
  • An OVERWRITE attribute has been added to <event-arg> which allows you to specify whether or not to use the value of the <event-arg> if an argument with the same name already exists in the event.
  • A PERSISTARGIGNORE attribute has been added to the <redirect> command so that you may specify a comma-delimited list of event arguments that will not be persisted across a redirect.


While we think the caching and logging functionality alone are reason enough to use Mach-II, we designed the caching and logging packages so they may be used independently of Mach-II. Mach-II has built-in loaders for caching and logging of course, but otherwise the caching and logging are in no way tied to Mach-II, so by writing a loader for your own implementation you can use caching and logging outside of Mach-II.

One of the core values of the Mach-II project is transparency in everything we do, and this helped make Mach-II 1.6 a great release. By soliciting feedback on features as early as we possibly can, and through your participation by telling us what you think, how you want the features to work, and most importantly by testing your code on alphas and betas, you are helping make Mach-II stronger. Thanks so much to our fantastic users for their help! We had a couple of companies building large applications on Mach-II 1.6 very early in the process, and their feedback was invaluable.

No rest for the weary (or is that wicked?), so next up is Mach-II 1.8, which is already about 90% complete. As we've said a couple of times before, after the 1.6 release we're going to release fewer features more frequently so that we can better manage our release cycle as well as get new features into your hot little hands even sooner. Look for preliminary specs on Mach-II 1.8 features very soon.

In the meantime, go grab Mach-II 1.6 final and let us know what you think!

Mach-II 1.6, Announcements  |  Send
Posted 2/9/09 @ 9:10 AM by Matt Woodward

Comments

Hats off to the whole team; well done and thank you for all of your hard work and contributions. You've made life easier for many, many people ;)

Posted by Mike Fransblow at 2/9/09 10:01 AM

Congratulations gentlemen! Stellar job as usual.

Posted by Hussein Grant at 2/18/09 6:18 AM