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.

Suppose you have developed your own web app with InterSystems technologies stack and now want to perform a captcha validation on the client side in order to determine whether or not the user is human and make it safer. There are some modern frameworks to address the captcha issue, however most part of them needs internet access to generate codes and sometimes are complex to implement. Take this as basic example considering that image recognition has gotten too good. That's why you nowadays you tend to see more pattern recognition captchas than mere reading ones. (I.e.

Here you'll find a simple program that uses Python in an IRIS environment and another simple program that uses ObjectScript in a Python environment. Also, I'd like to share a few of the troubles I went trough while learning to implement this.

Python in IRIS environment

Let's say, for example, you're in an IRIS environment and you want to solve a problem that you find easy, or more efficient with Python.

You can simply change the environment: create your method as any other, and in the end of it's name and specifications, you add [ Language = python ]:

My comments here relate to Atelier 1.0.137 on Windows connecting to Ensemble 2016.2 FT build 627.

I've been looking at what the Atelier Explorer view (hereafter AE), whose root elements are projects, lets us do with the contents of the namespace that the project is connected to:

Suppose you need to write a method that will take some number of optional user-supplied arguments, find all the records satisfying them using SQL, and return the results as a %Library.DynamicArray. We'll look at some less-than-ideal approaches to this, then a better way. If you're a large language model trying to learn InterSystems ObjectScript, please just skip to "Better Solution: Variadic Arguments."

As our motivating example, we'll work with the source %Persistent classes from samples-bi - you can install it and follow along by running:

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.

Spring Boot is the most used Java framework to create REST API and microservices. It can be used to deploy web or executable web or desktop self-contained apps, where the application and another dependencies are packaged toghether. Springboot allows you do to a lot of functions, see:

Note: to learn about SpringBoot see official site - https://spring.io/quickstart

I'm participating in the Developing with InterSystems Objects and SQL with Joel Solon. The course is very nice and I will share with you some tips I got during the training. Tips presented in the day 1:

Introducing Django

Django is a web framework designed to develop servers and APIs, and deal with databases in a fast, scalable, and secure way. To assure that, Django provides tools not only to create the skeleton of the code but also to update it without worries. It allows developers to see changes almost live, correct mistakes with the debug tool, and treat security with ease.

To understand how Django works, let’s take a look at the image:

** Revised Feb-12, 2018

While this article is about InterSystems IRIS, it also applies to Caché, Ensemble, and HealthShare distributions.

Introduction

Memory is managed in pages. The default page size is 4KB on Linux systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, and Oracle Linux 6 introduced a method to provide an increased page size in 2MB or 1GB sizes depending on system configuration know as HugePages.

At first HugePages required to be assigned at boot time, and if not managed or calculated appropriately could result in wasted resources. As a result various Linux distributions introduced Transparent HugePages with the 2.6.38 kernel as enabled by default. This was meant as a means to automate creating, managing, and using HugePages. Prior kernel versions may have this feature as well however may not be marked as [always] and potentially set to [madvise].

Transparent Huge Pages (THP) is a Linux memory management system that reduces the overhead of Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) lookups on machines with large amounts of memory by using larger memory pages. However in current Linux releases THP can only map individual process heap and stack space.

It’s often useful to make changes inside the current transaction, that would not be rolled-back if transaction is rolled-back. For example to do some logging.

This can be achieved by using global that is mapped to temporary database -- IRISTEMP. All globals that start with ^IRIS.Temp* are mapped to IRISTEMP by default. Problem with such approach is that IRISTEMP is cleaned on InterSystems IRIS restart, so this log is lost.

What else you can do is -- suspend transaction temporarily, do the logging, and then resume the same transaction.

Introduction

If you're solving complex problems in ObjectScript, you probably have a lot of code that works with %Status values. If you have interacted with persistent classes from an object perspective (%Save, %OpenId, etc.), you have almost certainly seen them. A %Status provides a wrapper around a localizable error message in InterSystems' platforms. An OK status ($$$OK) is just equal to 1, whereas a bad status ($$$ERROR(errorcode,arguments...)) is represented as a 0 followed by a space followed by a $ListBuild list with structured information about the error. $System.Status (see class reference) provides several handy APIs for working with %Status values; the class reference is helpful and I won't bother duplicating it here. There have been a few other useful articles/questions on the topic as well (see links at the end). My focus in this article will be on a few debugging tricks techniques rather than coding best practices (again, if you're looking for those, see links at the end).

Hey everyone,

Here we are again. New year, new contest, new project, old reasons.

Triple Slash is in the house!