Today, we'd like to spotlight one of the standout members of the InterSystems Developer Community: @Benjamin De Boe. Since the inception of the InterSystems Developer Community, he has shared his expertise, contributing thoughtful articles, practical demos, and answers to questions. Having worked with InterSystems products since 2010, Benjamin brought invaluable knowledge to the Developer Community. From navigating iKnow projects to simplifying complex deployments with Docker and Python, he has continually inspired fellow developers through his work and presence on the Community.

🤩 Let's take a closer look at Benjamin's journey with InterSystems technology and our Developer Community...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformative potential for driving value and insights from data. As we progress toward a world where nearly every application will be AI-driven, developers building those applications will need the right tools to create experiences from these applications. Tools like vector search are essential for enabling efficient and accurate retrieval of relevant information from massive datasets when working with large language models.

I received some really excellent feedback from a community member on my submission to the Python 2024 contest. I hope its okay if I repost it here:

Motivation

I didn't know about ObjectScript until I started my new job. Objectscript isn't actually a young programming language. Compared to C++, Java and Python, the community isn't as active, but we're keen to make this place more vibrant, aren't we?

I've noticed that some of my colleagues are finding it tricky to get their heads around the class relationships in these huge projects. There aren't any easy-to-use modern class diagram tool for ObjectScript.

Related Work

I have tried relavant works:

Introduction to running WSGI in IRIS

With IRIS 2024+, users can host WSGI applications using Security.Applications. As an example, a user can do something like this

Minimum working example

In the world of APIs, REST is very extended. But what happens when you need more flexibility in your data-fetching strategies? For instance letting the client to choose what fields is going to receive. Enter GraphQL, a query language for your APIs that provides a flexible alternative to REST.

In this post, we will:

• Compare REST and GraphQL.
• Dive into the basics of GraphQL: Queries, Mutations, and HTTP.
• Build a simple GraphQL server implementation using Graphene, SQLAlchemy, and Flask over data in InterSystems IRIS.
• Explore how to deploy your GraphQL server as a WSGI application in IRIS.

Accessing an Azure cloud storage to upload/download blobs is quite easy using the designated %Net.Cloud.Storage.Client class API methods, or using the EnsLib.CloudStorage.* inbound/outbound adaptors.

Note that you'll need to have the %JavaServer External Language Server up and running to use the cloud storage API or adaptors, since they both use the PEX framework using the Java Server.

Here is a quick summary:

Thirteen years ago, I attained dual undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and math, then promptly started full-time at InterSystems using neither. One of my most memorable and stomach-churning academic experiences was in Stats II. On an exam, I was solving a moderately difficult confidence interval problem. I was running out of time, so (being an engineer) I wrote out the definite integral on the exam paper, punched it into my graphing calculator, wrote an arrow with “calculator” over it, then wrote the result.

Welcome to the third and final publication of our articles dedicated to the development of RAG applications based on LLM models. In this final article, we will see, based on our small example project, how we can find the most appropriate context for the question we want to send to our LLM model and for this we will make use of the vector search functionality included in IRIS.

I recently met an ages old issue related to code maintenance:

• You have access to your IRIS server just over ODBC/JDBC
• no VSCode access, no Studio access
• no (Web-)Terminal access

But you need to take a look on Classes or Routines or Globals !!
Anyhow SQL is your friend.

As we keep updating our software, we often realize that we require more and more modern solutions. So far, only one major piece of our software relies on reading barcodes in documents and images. Since Cache did not have a means of reading barcodes in the past, we have always achieved our goals by using a Visual Basic 6 application. However, it is no longer an ideal solution because it is currently complicated to maintain it. IRIS also lacks this capability, but it has recently got an option that makes up for it: embedded Python!

Hey Community!

Here's the recap of the final half-day of the InterSystems Ready 2025! It was the last chance to see everyone and say farewell until next time.

It was a warm and energetic closing, with great conversations, smiles, and unforgettable memories!

The final Ready 2025 moment with our amazing team!

After so many years of waiting, we finally got an official driver available on Pypi

Additionally, found JDBC driver finally available on Maven already for 3 months, and .Net driver on Nuget more than a month.

As an author of so many implementations of IRIS support for various Python libraries, I wanted to check it. Implementation of DB-API means that it should be replaceable and at least functions defined in the standard. The only difference should be in SQL.

And the beauty of using already existing libraries, that they already implemented other databases by using DB-API standard, and these libraries already expect how driver should work.

I decided to test InterSystems official driver by implementing its support in SQLAlchemy-iris library.

IrisFirebase - FCM