Background

The Mach-II website proclaims: “Mach-II is a web-application framework focused on easing software development and maintenance.” This introductory description points out a risk common among complex web-based applications built with other frameworks: as requirements expand, they grow too large and complex to maintain without considerable effort.

Mach-II arrived on the scene with this in mind. It’s a framework for organizing applications using standard OO techniques. This means reuse and scalability, two direct benefits of an OO approach, combined with a XML configuration file to control everything.
 
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The brainchild of Hal Helms and Ben Edwards, Mach-II first took shape as an advanced version of Fusebox. It took advantage of the then newly-introduced ColdFusion CFCs, or components (classes, in PHP-ese), to provide a framework that allowed developers to code their apps using a combination of events, listeners, filters and plugins. These elements are configured by loading up any Mach-II application’s mach-ii.xml file and mapping out the relationships as XML nodes and attributes.

You may be wondering what this has to do with PHP.  Well, thanks to the hard work of Alan Richmond, the Mach-II framework will soon be available to the developer community.  Continue reading this article for a preview of Mach-II development.

Basic Concepts

This article will introduce you to Mach-II. It features a basic example intended to demonstrate the framework’s appeal for simple to complex web applications. For a more comprehensive breakdown of the concepts behind the framework, see the following documents on Mach-II.com:

• Mach II Development Guide
• An Introduction to Implicit Invocation Architectures
• Mach-II Application Configuration
• How To Develop Listeners
• Request-Event-Exception Handling