Article
· Feb 25, 2019 4m read
Using Grafana directly from IRIS

There have been some very helpful articles in the community that show how to use Grafana with IRIS (or Cache/Ensemble) by using an intermediate database.

But I wanted to get at IRIS structures directly. In particular, i wanted to access the Cache History monitor data that is accessible by SQL as described here

https://community.intersystems.com/post/apm-using-cach%C3%A9-history-mon...

and didn't want anything between me and the data.

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Article
· Apr 1, 2019 3m read
Closures in ObjectScript

After many sleepless nights it's a pleasure to announce the newer, better, moderner ObjectScript compiler which implemented pretty much everything you ever wanted to have in modern ObjectScript:

  • Design objective of this new compiler is to parse reasonable subset of current ObjectScript syntax which will look readable for stranger, and not scare them with 1 letter syntax. The good start for compiler was the old-good COS Guidelines from here https://github.com/intersystems-ru/cos-guidelines
  • For reasons we mentioned above we do not parse 1 letter syntax. It's declared evil;
  • We do not handle dotted syntax for the same reason - modern syntax with {} is proper replacement for dotted syntax blocks;

But we not only parse the modern ObjectScript syntax, we have implemented finally the long-standing request which we always dreamed about. Closures!

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Article
· Mar 19, 2019 9m read
A Tutorial On WebSockets

Intro

Most server-client communication on the web is based on a request and response structure. The client sends a request to the server and the server responds to this request. The WebSocket protocol provides a two-way channel of communication between a server and client, allowing servers to send messages to clients without first receiving a request. For more information on the WebSocket protocol and its implementation in InterSystems IRIS, see the links below.

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In an ever-changing world, companies must innovate to stay competitive. This ensures that they’ll make decisions with agility and safety, aiming for future results with greater accuracy.
Business Intelligence (BI) tools help companies make intelligent decisions instead of relying on trial and error. These intelligent decisions can make the difference between success and failure in the marketplace.
Microsoft Power BI is one of the industry’s leading business intelligence tools. With just a few clicks, Power BI makes it easy for managers and analysts to explore a company’s data. This is important because when data is easy to access and visualize, it’s much more like it’ll be used to make business decisions.


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One of the many benefits of using Atelier for your ObjectScript development is its integration with a wide range of source control systems. This integration enables you to use modern development workflows which increase collaboration while minimizing the risk inherent to volatile code bases.

Veteran ObjectScript developers can tell you about the workarounds that were needed before they could use source control systems with products like Caché and Ensemble. One of these was to treat the data store itself effectively as a code repository. And so shared development environments became essential for many of our customers to be productive and successful.

For code shops that rely on shared development environments, adopting Atelier might seem too complicated. This article aims to provide a practical example to guide your team towards success with Atelier.

You can find an overview of the problems and solutions in this article here, which is a good place to start. This article assumes that you are familiar with the concepts introduced there.

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Article
· Feb 11, 2019 4m read
Using Oauth2 with SOAP (Web)Services

Hi guys,

Couple days ago, a customer approached me with the wish to enhance their existing legacy application, that uses SOAP (Web)Services so it shares the same authorization with their new application API based on REST. As their new application uses OAuth2, the challenge was clear; how to pass access token with SOAP request to the server.

After spending some time on Google, it turned out, that one of possible ways of doing so was adding an extra header element to the SOAP envelope and then making sure the WebService implementation does what is needed to validate the access token.

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Hi Developers!

Recently we launched InterSystems Package Manager - ZPM. And one of the intentions of the ZPM is to let you package your solution and submit into the ZPM registry to make its deployment as simple as "install your-package" command.

To do that you need to introduce module.xml file into your repository which describes what is your InterSystems IRIS package consists of.

This article describes different parts of module.xml and will help you to craft your own.

I will start from samples-objectscript package, which installs into IRIS the Sample ObjectScript application and could be installed with:

zpm: USER>install samples-objectscript

It is probably the simplest package ever and here is the module.xml which describes the package:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Export generator="Cache" version="25">
  <Document name="samples-objectscript.ZPM">
    <Module>
      <Name>samples-objectscript</Name>
      <Version>1.0.0</Version>
      <Packaging>module</Packaging>
      <SourcesRoot>src</SourcesRoot>
      <Resource Name="ObjectScript.PKG"/>
    </Module>
  </Document>
</Export>

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The last time that I created a playground for experimenting with machine learning using Apache Spark and an InterSystems data platform, see Machine Learning with Spark and Caché, I installed and configured everything directly on my laptop: Caché, Python, Apache Spark, Java, some Hadoop libraries, to name a few. It required some effort, but eventually it worked.

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How can you allow computers to trust one another in your absence while maintaining security and privacy?

“A Dry Martini”, he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
"Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, 1953


OAuth helps to separate services with user credentials from “working” databases, both physically and geographically. It thereby strengthens the protection of identification data and, if necessary, helps you comply with the requirements of countries' data protection laws.

With OAuth, you can provide the user with the ability to work safely from multiple devices at once, while "exposing" personal data to various services and applications as little as possible. You can also avoid taking on "excess" data about users of your services (i.e. you can process data in a depersonalized form).

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Article
· Dec 7, 2019 1m read
About %objlasterror

%objlasterror is a useful reference to the last error.

Every time $$$ERROR is called, %objlasterror is set to a result of this call.

It's important in cases where you want to convert exception to status:

Try {
   //  quality code
} Catch ex {
   Set sc = $g(%objlasterror, $$$OK)
   Set sc = $$$ADDSC(sc, ex.AsStatus())
}

Because AsStatus calls $$$ERROR under the wraps, the order is important, first you need to get %objlasterror and convert exception after that.

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Hi Community!

I think everyone keeps the source code of the project in the repository nowadays: Github, GitLab, bitbucket, etc. Same for InterSystems IRIS projects check any on Open Exchange.

What do we do every time when start or continue working with a certain repository with InterSystems Data Platform?

We need a local InterSystems IRIS machine, have the environment for the project set up and the source code imported.

So every developer performs the following:

  1. Check out the code from repo
  2. Install/Run local IRIS installation
  3. Create a new namespace/database for a project
  4. Import the code into this new namespace
  5. Setup all the rest environment
  6. Start/continue coding the project

If you dockerize your repository this steps line could be shortened to this 3 steps:

  1. Check out the code from repo
  2. Run docker-compose build
  3. Start/continue coding the project

Profit - no any hands-on for 3-4-5 steps which could take minutes and bring head ache sometime.

You can dockerize (almost) any your InterSystems repo with a few following steps. Let’s go!

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Article
· Jul 26, 2019 3m read
Dynamic SQL to Dynamic Object

Hello community! I have to work with queries using all kinds of methods like embedded sql and class queries. But my favorite is dynamic sql, simply because of how easy it is to manipulate them at runtime. The downside to writing a lot of these is the maintenance of the code and interacting with the output in a meaningful way.

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InterSystems API Management (IAM) - a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform, enables you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure. In case you missed it, here is the link to the announcement. And here's an article explaining how to start working with IAM.

In this article, we would use InterSystems API Management to Load Balance an API.

In our case, we have 2 InterSystems IRIS instances with /api/atelier REST API that we want to publish for our clients.

There are many different reasons why we might want to do that, such as:

  • Load balancing to spread the workload across servers
  • Blue-green deployment: we have two servers, one "prod", other "dev" and we might want to switch between them
  • Canary deployment: we might publish the new version only on one server and move 1% of clients there
  • High availability configuration
  • etc.
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Article
· Jan 18, 2019 2m read
Free IRIS Community Edition in AWS

Good News!! You can use now the Free InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the AWS Cloud

Hello,

It's very common that people new in InterSystems IRIS want to start to work in a personal project in a full free environment. If you are one of this, Good News!! You can use now the Free InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the AWS Cloud.

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Article
· Nov 11, 2019 11m read
Transactions in Global InterSystems IRIS

InterSystems IRIS supports a unique data structure, called globals, for information storage. Essentially, globals are persistent arrays with multi-level indices, having several extra capabilities—transactions, quick traversal of tree structures, and a programming language known as ObjectScript.

I'd note that for the remainder of the article, or at least the code samples, we'll assume you have familiarised yourself with the basics of globals:

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Article
· Jun 10, 2019 2m read
GitHub now supports ObjectScript

Hey developers,

I have great news for you. A few days ago, GitHub was updated with the latest version of linguist project, which is being used to recognize source code types in repositories. It helps to determine which programming language had been used in every file of the repository. Repository statistics section shows the results of this module work.

Also, you can search across all available GitHub repositories for any chosen language.

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Article
· Mar 15, 2019 2m read
Tar compress tool in ObjectScript

I'm sure most of you have already familiar with the possibility of using GZIP in InterSystems products. But, the problem is that GZIP working only with one file or stream, and it does not support folders. When you work in Unix systems, there is a possibility how to solve it, using tar compress tool which goes with every Linux system from out of the box. But what to do if you have work on Windows as well, which does not have it.

I am pleased to offer you my new project isc-tar, which will help you do not care about operating system, and deal with tar files anywhere.

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This is more for my memory that anything else but I thought I'd share it because it often comes up in comments, but is not in the InterSystems documentation.

There is a wonderful utility called ^REDEBUG that increases the level of logging going into mgr\cconsole.log.

You activate it by

a) start terminal/login

b) zn "%SYS"

c) do ^REDEBUG

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Why log in to view pivot tables when you can have them delivered directly to your inbox? Are you in need of automated reporting for InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence? Pivot Subscriptions is your solution: a tool for subscribing to scheduled email reports of pivot tables inside InterSystems IRIS Business Intelligence (previously known as DeepSee).

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