Mach-II 1.8 Release Candidate Available

Team Mach-II (which is now six people strong!) is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Mach-II 1.8 RC1. Download Mach-II 1.8 RC1 now.

Mach-II 1.8 introduces numerous new features and also sets the stage for us to move forward to 1.9 code named "Integrity" and the big 2.0 release code named "Velocity".

New features and enhancements include:

• 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.

via mach-ii.com

I'm so excited because we're starting a whole new development cycle for Mach-II. Mach-II Simplicity (1.8) has been development for an entire year now and having a new features is going to be a lot of fun. We're moving to a milestone type releases so look for new features soon in Mach-II 1.9 code named "Integrity".