It's been 6 months since InterSystems released Atelier 1.0 and we continue to roll out enhancements and new features through the beta channel (please see the Atelier Download page for details). In the meantime, we have received a lot of messages from the Developer Community with ideas for further improvements. Based on your feedback, we created a roadmap for Atelier 1.1 so you can conveniently track when specific features are going to be integrated.

It was my answer to the question appeared in GoogleGroups. And when I answered there I figured out that it might worth to post an article and to add some light on how Unicode is stored in Caché.

Cogs Library

Over the next few months I will be releasing a number of open source libraries and tools to the Caché community.

Most of the code has evolved from previous production grade solutions over the years and I am collating it together under a single overarching library package that I am calling Cogs.

Globals, these magic swords for storing data, have been around for a while, but not many people can use them efficiently or know about this super-weapon altogether.

If you use globals for tasks where they truly shine, the results may be amazing, either in terms of increased performance or dramatic simplification of the overall solution (1, 2).

Globals offer a special way of storing and processing data, which is completely different from SQL tables. They were first introduced in 1966 in the M(UMPS) programming language, which was initially used in medical databases. It is still used in the same way, but has also been adopted by some other industries where reliability and high performance are top priorities: finance, trading, etc.

Later M(UMPS) evolved into Caché ObjectScript (COS). COS was developed by InterSystems as a superset of M. The original language is still accepted by developers' community and alive in a few implementations. There are several signs of activity around the web: MUMPS Google group, Mumps User's group), effective ISO Standard, etc.

Modern global based DBMS supports transactions, journaling, replication, partitioning. It means that they can be used for building modern, reliable and fast distributed systems.

Globals do not restrict you to the boundaries of the relational model. They give you the freedom of creating data structures optimized for particular tasks. For many applications reasonable use of globals can be a real silver bullet offering speeds that developers of conventional relational applications can only dream of.

Globals as a method of storing data can be used in many modern programming languages, both high- and low-level. Therefore, this article will focus specifically on globals and not the language they once came from.

EDIT: This article has been updated with up-to-date information about the Port project, which now includes a tutorial for basic usage.

The Port project is something that I've introduced more than two years ago but I hadn't enough room to elaborate a tutorial on how to use it till now.

First, the motivation:

Hi, Community!

We have a lot of good articles posted on Community to the date. Even more questions with great answers (see the stats). Thank you for your contribution!

So sometimes it worth to use search to find an answer or the best practices or the post you remember was posted but cannot find.

Configuring an Ensemble production can be a challenging task involving a thorough understanding of the system and production functionality and a detailed understanding towards each configuration item. After successfully configured an Ensemble production, you might need to set up an identical production on the mirror environment, or deploy the production on a development system to a live system, or send a copy for diagnostic/debug purposes. Other times you might have spent some time designing a BPL/DTL and some other productions can use the same logic.

Wanna Cry

Most of you should be aware that the Wanna Cry virus is massively infecting un-patched windows machines all around the world. It's particularly affecting the NHS, one of my main clients.

Wanna Cry is one of a line of Viruses that exploit SMBv1 over ports 135 and 445.

A kill switch has been enabled, but this won't protect machines sitting behind http proxies, and there are already reports of new versions without a kill switch.

All windows machines should be isolated and updated a.s.a.p.

In our last lesson, we added some formatting and validation to our Edit Widget form. So, now we are ready to add the ability to add new Widgets to our application. However, the great Widget Wars have come to an abrupt end, as Widget Direct has purchased its biggest competitor, WorldWideWidgets. In order to maintain some continuity, we need to display their catalog on our new application.

Hi Everyone,

Link to webinar recording: https://learning.intersystems.com/course/view.php?id=623

Thank you for your interest in this webinar!

Please submit questions about the content of the webinar as comments below this article.

Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Part 3. Appendix

InterSystems IRIS OAUTH classes explained

In the previous part of our series we have learned about configuring InterSystems IRIS to act as an OAUTH client as well as authorization and authentication server (by means of OpenID Connect). In this final part of our series we are going to describe classes implementing InterSystems IRIS OAuth 2.0 framework. We will also discuss use cases for selected methods of API classes.

The API classes implementing OAuth 2.0 can be separated into three different groups according to their purpose. All classes are implemented in %SYS namespace. Some of them are public (via % package), some not and should not be called by developers directly.

Something that shot up the popularity stakes last week was this article on a very interesting initiative: RealWorld:

https://medium.com/@ericsimons/introducing-realworld-6016654d36b5

I decided it would be a good idea to use this as a way of creating an exemplar implementation of a RESTful back-end using QEWD against their published API (https://github.com/gothinkster/realworld/tree/master/api)

The results are here:

In our last lesson, we implemented a new REST Service to allow us to perform CRU operations on Widgets, and refactored our Controllers to allow the page setup to be decouple from the content.

XDATA is used for a whole host of ISC libraries to store things like Zen pages, BPL logic and DTL transformations.

XDATA is the equivalent of XML config files of the JAVA world and JSON config files of the JavaScript / NPM world.

Whilst Atelier looks to shift source code to the disk, XDATA will remain a key component to source control our projects config / meta data.