Macromedia MAX 2003

Mach-II Intro

Stephen Rittler CounterMarch Systems

Agenda

 Genesis of Mach-ii  Components of a Mach application  Overview of a request/response cycle with Mach  A peek under the covers of a functioning Mach application 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]

      Mach-ii.xml

Plugins and filters

Components

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Mach-ii.xml

 The “controller”  Defines application flow  Lots of fun to work with in a development team!

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Properties

 The area of the XML file where you stash variables that you used to drop in Application.cfm

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Event handlers

 Each action that a user takes (and some that are done implicitly) is an event  Each “event” is mapped to an “event-handler” in the xml file  Inside each event-handler are the data retrieval and display tags related to that event 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]

Page-view

 A page-view is just display logic and any user input fields  There is no data retrieval in the view template. All data is passed in via request variables {real, live code demo} 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]

Listeners

 The “data go-getters”  They sit out there in application scope and wait to be called on {real, live code demo} 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]

Plugins and Filters

Stolen from Sean Corfield:  Rule of thumb: if you need to do it on every single request, event handler, or view, you should use a plugin.

 If you need to perform some operation on data provided to certain events or listener methods, you should use a filter.

The inner workings of plugins and filters are beyond the scope of today’s workshop. They are a great way to implement a login/security framework though!

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Let’s look at an application!

 Reviewing the request/response cycle 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]

Lessons Learned

 We’ve been developing applications using Mach-ii for a little over a year now  We were not Fusebox developers; learned from scratch with the Amkor guys (you rock!)  Spin-up time was FAST  Solid naming conventions are key to maintainability  Fundamentals of OOP are important  More learning in this area is warranted  Version control software is vital. The XML file changes frequently, especially on a large development team 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]

 Questions? Comments?

Q and A

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Resources

http://www.mach-ii.info/ http://tutorial345.easycfm.com/ http://livedocs.macromedia.com/wtg/public/machiidevguide/ 2771 Red Oak Circle Bethlehem, PA 18017 [email protected]