There has been a interesting discussion on the Mach-II mailing list recently regarding the very future of the framework. Growing up is hard to do.

Peter Farrell has done a good job of summarizing the debate on his blog. Check it out.

I just read that the next point-release of the Mach-II framework has just been released. Some bugs have been fixed and some enhancements have made it in as well. One that I find interesting is that Plugins now execute in the order in which they appear in the configuration document. To get the latest version go to: http://www.mach-ii.com/code.cfm

This was just posted on the Mach-II mailing list:

In the spirit of sites like cflib.org and cfczone.org, I've added an "Exchange" to the mach-ii.info site. Check it out http://mach-ii.info/index.cfm?event=exchange and don't forget to submit your code.

Thanks,
Phil

In his blog, ColdFusion vs. Java, Simon Wacker talks about converting an existing ColdFusion application to MachII. For completeness he also implemented it in Java using the Spring framework.

In the final analysis he found the Java version the best and most flexible. I think he misunderestimates the true potential of CFML and I don't really agree with his assesment of MachII as not being as "flexible" as other frameworks. Give it a read and share your thoughts.

A couple of days ago I started working on a new site and all I had was a preliminary set of IA wireframe documents. The site is a rather small one, and so I decided to play around with building a basic online wireframe of the it.

What did I do? I decided to just create a view template for each each page in the site and I gave each page its own public event in the config file. I also created a sub-view and a private event for each section navigation header. I then created a final view template and private event for the rendering of the complete layout.

All I needed to do then was link them all together. I did this with a [preView] plugin that determines if the current page is part of the IA wireframe (public events). If the page is in a section that has its own navigation, it announces and event to render that view. It then announces the final event that assembles the output with the global header and footer, optional section navigation, and the main page.

The plugin is able do to this because of a second XML configuration file that contains the sections and pages within the IA and the relationship between them. What this gives me is a mach-ii.xml file that has all of the public events and views defined without any of the information required for wireframing. What I can now do is gradually convert or swap out views associated with the wireframe with functional pages that implement the display while adding contoller logic to the config file--all without having to mess with the linkages defined by the wireframe.

When all done, I had only spent an afternoon putting this together. I probably could have done this before I ever heard of MachII, but the path I took towards the solution was really illuminated by the framework.

Gotta love a tool that guide you to an such a simple yet elegant solution.

Apparently there are some problems with the installation instructions for cfcUnit. If you have any specific problems with the install, let me know. I'm working on resolving some issues that have come up in the last couple of days.