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Mach-II Google Group Now 500 Strong!

Yesterday the Mach-II Google Group reached a big milestone: our 500th member joined! We're very excited that the interest in Mach-II continues to grow, and want to thank all the members of our growing community. Thanks also to everyone who attended my "Head First Mach-II" session at CFUnited yesterday. It was fantastic to have a packed room and so many great questions, and several people told me afterwards that they're starting to have "light bulb moments" with Mach-II, which is always good to hear.

With the great new features in Mach-II 1.6 like logging and caching, and the very cool stuff we have planned for Mach-II 2.0, now's a great time to be getting into Mach-II!

Team Mach-II Offers New Workshops - Take Our Survey

Prior to cf.Objective() 2008 in St. Paul, Minnesota, 40 developers attended two days of workshops facilitated by Team Mach-II (i.e., Peter Farrell, Kurt Wiersma, and Matt Woodward).  The workshops were designed to help developers enhance their knowledge about object-oriented programming and learn how to build enterprise-level applications in Mach-II.

Participants said the following about the Mach-II workshops:

• "I'm not sure how it could have been presented better."

• "Absolutely excellent workshop. All of the speakers were wonderful. They knew what they were talking about and were excellent speakers. The organization was wonderful and each session was in digestible chunks that built on the other . . . I will highly recommend this to everyone."

• "All of you guys are great speakers, and your enthusiasm for and knowledge of the subject matter really makes this interesting. Presentation materials were well-organized and very informative. Thanks for a great workshop – I am going to give Mach-II a try!"

• "Overall a really good job guys. Congrats. Excellent slides and handouts . . . A solid class. I hope you’ll be delivering it many more times."

• "Amazing workshop!!! I will highly recommend this to everyone! All three speakers were fantastic and really knew their stuff. And I loved the mixing up the sessions with different speakers to allow us to get different perspectives . . . Thanks very much! I am starting to migrate an application to Mach-II tonight."

Team Mach-II is in the process of redesigning the workshops, which will be offered at certain locations in the United States sometime later this year. Individuals interested in providing input to help improve the workshops and make them available in different parts of the country are invited to complete the Mach-II Workshop Survey.

Individuals completing this survey will be provided a link for downloading Matt Woodward's 13-page document entitled, "ColdFusion Components (CFCs): A Primer." ColdFusion Components (CFCs) serve as the basis for object-oriented programming (OOP) in CFML. Since Mach-II is an OO-based framework, it is crucial to understand CFCs to be able to use Mach-II successfully.  This primer was created to give developers some background and history of the CFML language from the standpoint of enabling modular application development. The primer also intends to introduce developers to the power of CFCs and why it is important to take advantage of CFCs in building applications.

Take the Mach-II Workshop Survey

When is Mach-II 1.6 going to be released?

Ah, the age old question. While we could say "it will come when it comes," this is a bit of a cop-out phrase, and we also feel it promotes secrecy and uncertainty as opposed to the openness and transparency that is required for a great, community-driven open source project.

We could easily go into a Beta of Mach-II 1.6 today, but since Kurt and I are both going on vacation (independently of course), we'd prefer to wait on an official beta so we are able to better respond to your questions and comments. Remember that you can grab the bleeding edge release (BER) from SVN or our nightly builds, so don't feel as though you have to wait for the beta in order to start gearing up for version 1.6.

Our plan at this point is to release the Beta in early June once the both of us get back, since Kurt and I will be the point people when it comes to discussing the particulars on how logging, caching and the new ColdspringProperty.cfc works.  A nice side effect is that both our brains will be fresh from all the relaxing we get on our vacations, so we'll be ready and eager to handle all the beta activity.

Mark your calendars for early June, 2008 for the Mach-II 1.6 Beta! In the meantime, be sure to download the BER Zip of Mach-II 1.6 available from the code page of our website.

What's New in Mach-II 1.6 and 2.0?

Peter gave an extremely well-received presentation at cf.Objective() covering what's new in Mach-II 1.6 and even a bit about what we have in mind for version 2.0, and if you've been curious, be sure to download his presentation! We'll have an official beta for 1.6 available in mid-June, and development on 2.0 is already underway.

Some of the highlights for 1.6 include:

• Improved Application.cfc bootstrapper
• Publish/subscribe listener method invocation
• Caching package
• Logging package
• ColdSpringProperty.cfc (replaces the ColdSpring plugin)
• Miscellaneous fixes and improvements

The caching and logging packages in particular are extremely flexible, powerful new features in 1.6. Mach-II 1.6 ships with two caching strategies and three loggers, but we've made it very easy to extend and implement your own. For example, if you want to use MemCache, Mach-II 1.6 does not ship with that functionality, but it's very simple to add this--or any other caching strategy--yourself.

There's much more information and details in Peter's presentation, so grab it now and learn all about the fantastic new features in 1.6, as well as what we have planned for Mach-II 2.0!