Matt, Kurt and Peter are leading a Mach-II Work Session in March via Google Hang-Out. If you're interested in helping out on the project - coding, documentation or even have a question drop on by.

When: Saturday March 3rd, 2012 from Noon - 6pm CT (10am - 4pm PT)

Where: Google Plus Hang-Out using SVN / Trac

Just follow our Google+ Mach-II page and join our public hang-out that day.  If you're coming, we'd love to hear from you now in our comments and we'll send you a reminder just a few days before!

Free Mach-II Training

GreatBizTools, our commercial sponsor of Mach-II, is a sponsor of OpenCF Summit again in 2012. - February 24-26, 2012. This year's conference schedule is going to be slightly different this year with the unconference sessions and other trainings happening on Day 1 - Friday, Feburary 24th, 2012.

We're proud to announce that Team Mach-II is going to be offering FREE jumpstart to Mach-II and ColdSpring using OOP development techniques at OpenCFSummit 2012!

Where: OpenCF Summit, Dallas TX
When: Day 1 - February 24th, 2012
Cost: Free

We don't have exact details on the start/end times for Day 1 at the conference. If you want to get a leg up on OOP development using a framework in CFML, this is the year to come to the conference. Once we get more details lined up, you will be able to reserve your space at the Mach-II training.

HackFest at OpenCF Summit

Team Mach-II is running the annual Hackfest at the conference which runs all three days of the conference.  What is a Hackfest you ask?  It's an event where programmers meet for collaborative programming.  During the hackfest, we'll be building an open-source application for a non-profit. Best of all we'll be using a bunch of open-source technologies such as OpenBD, Railo, Apache, ColdSpring, Mach-II, JQuery, HSQL, OpenBD Desktop, and others.

We learned a lot about how to organize a HackFest from the 2011 conference and we're working hard to build upon last year's success to make this year's HackFest even better!

See you in February!

With the advent of dynamic database driven pages many moons ago, you can probably access the same information from multiple URLs.  How does that affect your Google rankings?  Probably adversely.  Enter the canonical URLs via an HTML meta tag which you put in the head part of your document:

 <link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/directory/page.html" /> 

Canonical URLs allows webmasters to provide a "preferred" or "canonical" link that specifies the preferred version of the webpage as part of SEO.  If you have multiple ways to get at the same content, then you should be specifying a canonical link to the preferred URL for SEO.

According to Google, canonical links are just a directive but "strongly honored" accord Google search guru Matt Cutts. So it's about time you start thinking of canonical URLs.

Luckily for us, Mach-II makes it easy to create.  Here is an example using the Mach-II view custom tag library:

 <cfimport prefix="view" taglib="/MachII/customtags/view/" />  <view:link type="canonical" route="productsServices.certification.features" /> 

We support a multitude of attributes from event, route and hrefs.  Be sure to check out the documentation on using <view:link /> custom tag in Mach-II for more information.

Brit's was too busy. Meet us at the hotel bar.

Team Mach-II is happy to announce the 3rd Annual Mach-II Night Out at cf.Objective() at Brit's Pub. Luckily we'll be arriving before Happy Hour ends at 6:30 so come early to enjoy most beer at $4 pint and all apps at $6 (menu).

When: Thursday, May 12th, 2011 - meet in hotel lobby at 5:30pm, walk to Hell's Kitchen at 5:45, starting at Brit's around 7:15pm onwards
Where:
Hell's Kitchen for Dinner - About three blocks from the conference hotel (Dinner Menu)
Brit's Pub - 11- Nicollet Ave - About two blocks from the conference hotel (Map / Directions)

Brit's a pretty large place with side walk seating, two tiers indoors and outdoor bowling green seating.  If you've come in past years, then you know this.  When you arrive, the easiest place to see where we are at Brit's is to check the comments on this blog post or check the Mach-II twitter feed.

Also, no RSVP is neccessary, but we would love to hear who's coming so feel free to leave a comment.  This number helps us figure out the size tables we need.

Another tip in our series of keeping code simple in our view layer.  A lot of developers copy event-args into the variables cope at the top of a view to make looping and other miscellaneous display logic more manageable.  This bit of code becomes more complex as our views get more complex.  Take this example:

 <cfimport prefix="view" taglib="/MachII/customtags/view" />
 <cfimport prefix="display" taglib="/lightpost/cftags/display/" />
 <cfscript>
     // Get data
     variables.adminBean = event.getArg("adminBean");
     variables.formattedName = event.getArg("adminBean").getFormattedName();
     variables.adminAnpBean = event.getArg("adminAnpBean");
     variables.adminAddressBean = event.getArg("adminAddressBean");
     variables.adminPrimaryPhoneBean = event.getArg("adminPrimaryPhoneBean");
     variables.adminSecondaryPhones = event.getArg("adminSecondaryPhones");
     variables.locations = event.getArg("assignedLocations");
     // Get services
     variables.timeService = getProperty("timeService");
     variables.uiService = getProperty("uiService");
     variables.udfs = getProperty("udfs");
     // Set meta data into the event object
     getProperty("html").addMeta("title", "Administrator Details for #variables.adminBean.getFormattedName()##");
     event.setArg("meta.cacheControl", TRUE);
 </cfscript>
 

Ouch, that is a bit of code to manage.  If you look carefully, you'll notice that most copies of args from the event have the same name when assigned to the variables scope (except for a few which we'll talk about later).  This can be simplified by using the new copyToScope() method available in Mach-II 1.8+:

     <cfimport prefix="view" taglib="/MachII/customtags/view" />
     <cfimport prefix="display" taglib="/lightpost/cftags/display/" />
     <cfset copyToScope("${event.adminBean}
             ,${event.adminBean.formattedName}
             ,${event.adminAnpBean}
             ,${event.adminAddressBean}
             ,${event.adminPrimaryPhoneBean}
             ,${event.adminSecondaryPhones}
             ,locations=${event.assignedLocations}
             ,${properties.timeService}
             ,${properties.uiService}
             ,${properties.udfs}") />
     <view:meta type="title" content="Administrator Details for #variables.formattedName#" />
     <cfset event.setArg("meta.cacheControl", TRUE) />
 

Wow! That's a lot less code than before.  Let's look at two special cases.  If you compared the two code blocks, notice that ${event.adminBean.formattedName} is not only getting the admin bean, but also making a call to a getter.  CopyToScope() uses the Mach-II Expression Language Syntax and if an object (CFC) is selected, it will dive deeper and call methods.  If you don't append a () a the end, the framework assumes you are calling a getter so behind the scenes it is really calling getFormattedName() for you.  Secondly, noticed that locations=${event.assignedLocations} is setting a different key name.  By default we use the last value in the dot path of the M2 EL syntax as the key name in the variables scope so in this case we'll set the data in "locations" instead of "assignedLocations".

Check out the CopyToScope documentation for more information on using deeply nested data and other nifty features.

We all work with slinging script fragments all over the place in our view layer.  I'm sure you have code that looks a lot like this everywhere:

 <cfsavecontent variable="variables.js">
 <script type="text/javascript">
     Event.observe(window, 'load', loadAccordions, false);
     
     function loadAccordions() {
         var verticalAccordion = new accordion('vertical_accordion');
     }
 </script>
 </cfsavecontent>
 <cfset addHTMLHeadElement(variables.js) />
 

We set some come into a variable via cfsaveconent and then sling it into the HTML head via addHTMLHeadElement() which wraps cfhtmlhead ultimately.  In Mach-II, you need to use this method if you want caching to observe and later replay elements you added to the head.  Ugh, that's a lot of useless code.  It would be helped if cfhtmlhead supported body content (OpenBD does BTW) instead of just string data in an attribute.

Enter the HTMLHelperProperty and the nifty view custom tag library in Mach-II 1.8:

 <cfimport prefix="view" taglib="/MachII/customtags/view" />
 <view:script>
     Event.observe(window, 'load', loadAccordions, false);
     
     function loadAccordions() {
         var verticalAccordion = new accordion('vertical_accordion');
     }
 </view:script>
 

Wow, by default the view:script tag saves the content and inserts it into the head for you!  If you wanted it inline, then you just add outputType="inline" as an attribute or if you are on OpenBD you can use "body" to insert it at the bottom of the HTML body element.  Best thing of all is that it automatically uses addHTMLHeadElement() behind the scenes for you -- so your code is Mach-II cachable by proxy.

So be sure to check out our lengthy documentation on the view library and HTML helper -- they do a lot of stuff other than what I've shown in this example.

In surprising news to use, our file download provider OhLoh pulled support for hosted downloads in the past couple of days.  They recently migrated to a new data center but neglected to tell us that after the switch the download service would be dropped.  So in the aftermath we are switching to SourceForge as our provider to host our downloads.  All of our links on our website have been restored however if you find an out dated link be sure to let us know