I was around when Mach-II first arose from the Fusebox world. I never really did understand it when Ben Edwards and Hal Helms tried explaining it at conferences so I figured I'd give it another try at Matt Woodward's Head First Mach-II session.

I came away this time having a better feeling for how Mach-II works. I'm certainly not an expert but I think I can now at least dig around inside the code and probably break things. But after I break them I think I can learn from the experience and maybe fix them again.

Mach-II (the II stands for Implicit Invocation) is an event driven framework that uses the MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern. An event is passed in the URL of a page, which then fires off processes behind the scenes. The important thing to take away from the session was the htree steps that occur when an event is triggered in the framework:

1. An event is announced (usually through a URL parameter but could be passed in a form)
2. shtuff happens
3. additional events are announced or the request ends

The framework allows for high cohesion (does one thing and does it well) and loose coupling (the degree that components rely on each other.)

It uses XML config files.

I'm looking forward to getting home and setting aside some time to play with this framework after the conference.

Posted by jhusum - 11:30 PM - General - Comments - Link to this entry