Almost exactly three months ago Atelier 1.0 was released. If you are an early adopter and have any feedback to share, here's a thread we could use.

For instance, during the Field Test I posted this article about the two explorers, Atelier Explorer (AE) and Server Explorer (SE). Presumably more people are now using Atelier, so I'd be interested to hear how it's going.

In this post, I am going to detail how to set up a mirror using SSL, including generating the certificates and keys via the Public Key Infrastructure built in to Caché. The goal of this is to take you from new installations to a working mirror with SSL, including a primary, backup, and DR async member, along with a mirrored database. I will not go into security recommendations or restricting access to the files. This is meant to just simply get a mirror up and running.

Inspired by the article "Declarative development in Caché" that's still trending on the dev com. The OP explored a functional style of iterating over a collection. A comment today suggested "Caché would need syntax support for anonymous functions".

With Macros you can kind of get anonymous like syntax using dot notation.

This is not production code, but it does work. First the macros...

Hi Community,

This article assumes that you are familiar with Zabbix and SNMP monitoring, if not, there are some very interesting posts on the Community, especially this one (https://community.intersystems.com/post/creating-custom-snmp-oids) which contains a lot of information on how to configure and request an SNMP Cache server.

Overview

Encryption of sensitive data becomes more and more important for applications. For example patient names, SSN, address-data or credit card-numbers etc..

Cache supports different flavors of encryption. Block-level database encryption and data-element encryption. The block-level database encryption protects an entire database. The decryption/encryption is done when a block is written/read to or from the database and has very little impact on the performance.

With data-element encryption only certain data-fields are encrypted. Fields that contain sensitive data like patient data or credit-card numbers. Data-element encryption is also useful if a re-encryption is required periodically. With data-element encryption it is the responsibility of the application to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Both encryption methods leverage the managed key encryption infrastructure of Caché.

The following article describes a sample use-case where data-element encryption is used to encrypt person data.

But what if you have hundreds of thousands of records with an encrypted datafield and you have the need to search that field? Decryption of the field-values prior to the search is not an option. What about indices?

This article describes a possible solution and develops step-by-step a small example how you can use SQL and indices to search encrypted fields.

By default, Analyzer executes queries as components are added. Often, there are times where you may know exactly what you are looking to do, and you do not want Analyzer to execute 5 queries as you drag and drop items onto rows/columns and select your filters. This is where toggling Auto-execute off can help.

The recent announcement of a collision for the SHA-1 hash algorithm has caused some consternation:

https://shattered.io/

Here is some background to help put this in perspective.

Cryptographic hash functions can have a variety of properties. The property at issue here is:

"Collision resistance - it is computationally infeasible to find any two distinct inputs x, x' which hash to the same output, i.e., such that h(x) = h(x')."

(Menezes, van Oorchot, and Vanstone, "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", section 9.2.2)

Until recently I didn't pay much attention to Portal's home page:

If it's not showing when you initially launch Portal you can easily jump to it using the button / tab at the top of the left-hand column of options. And later during your session, get there via the Home link that will be visible at the top of every page.

On the Home page the "Recent" section is automatically maintained for you.

In last week's discussion we created a simple graph based on the data input from one file. Now, as we all know, sometimes we have multiple different datafiles to parse and correlate. So this week we are going to load additional perfmon data and learn how to plot that into the same graph.
Since we might want to use our generated graphs in reports or on a webpage, we'll also look into ways to export the generated graphs.

The article makes an attempt to demonstrate that Atelier is not just repeating the functionality of Caché Studio on a new IDE platform (Eclipse) but goes far beyond. Due to my personal experience, and challenges in former projects I picked first XSLT Debugging. Is it an ordinary task? Not at all. Who is doing XSLT every day? Probably none of us. Than why XSLT Debugging? Simply because there are solutions in our product portfolio which are using XSLT inside and those solutions require customization. Customizing XSLT without some sort of toolkit is more than challenging. The examples of such solutions starts with HealthShare IHE message, CDA vs. SDA transformations, goes through ZEN Reports, and ends by HealthShare CDA document viewer. Is that enough reason to spend time reading the whole article through not just the teaser?

Have you ever thought what could be a reason why some development environment (database, language) would eventually become popular? What part of this popularity could be explain as language quality? What by new and idioms approaches introduced by early language adopters? What is due to healthy ecosystem collaboration? What is due to some marketing genius?

I thought I'd share some issues I had today with Zen development in a custom component. Say we have created a Zen composite component with a few javascript methods that modify its child components. In order to modify these components, we can use something like the following method: