#API

Background

InterSystems IRIS 2019 is going to introduce new and exciting features. One of the areas with new interesting must-to-know things is the API Management.

Jupyter Notebook is an interactive environment consisting of cells that allow executing code in a great number of different markup and programming languages.

To do this Jupyter has to connect to an appropriate kernel. There was no ObjectScript Kernel, that is why I decided to create one.

You can try it out here.

Here's a sneak peek of the results:

While reviewing our documentation for our ^pButtons (in IRIS renamed as ^SystemPerformance) performance monitoring utility, a customer told me: "I understand all of this, but I wish it could be simpler… easier to define profiles, manage them etc.".

After this session I thought it would be a nice exercise to try and provide some easier human interface for this.

The first step in this was to wrap a class-based API to the existing pButtons routine.

I was also able to add some more "features" like showing what profiles are currently running, their time remaining to run, previously running processes and more.

The next step was to add on top of this API, a REST API class.

With this artifact (a pButtons REST API) in hand, one can go ahead and build a modern UI on top of that.

For example -

Recently I needed to generate a Swagger spec from persistent and serial classes, so I'm publishing my code (it's not complete - you still need to hash out the application specifics, but it's a start). It's available here.

Let's say you have these classes:

Over the past year or so, my team (Application Services at InterSystems - tasked with building and maintaining many of our internal applications, and providing tools and best practices for other departmental applications) has embarked on a journey toward building Angular/REST-based user interfaces to existing applications originally built using CSP and/or Zen. This has presented an interesting challenge that may be familiar to many of you - building out new REST APIs to existing data models and business logic.

A concurrent session in IRIS:
SQL, Objects, REST, and GraphQL

Kazimir Malevich, "Athletes" (1932)

"But of course you don't understand! How can a person who has always traveled in a horse-drawn carriage understand the feelings and impressions of the express traveler or the pilot in the air?"

Kazimir Malevich (1916)

Introduction

We’ve already addressed the topic of why object/type representation is superior to SQL for implementing subject area models. And those conclusions and facts are as true now as they have ever been. So why should we take a step back and discuss technologies that drag abstractions back to the global level, where they had been in the pre-object and pre-type era? Why should we encourage the use of spaghetti code, which results in bugs that are hard to track down, and which relies only on virtuoso developer skills?

There are several arguments in favor of transmitting data via SQL/REST/GraphQL-based APIs as opposed to representing them as types/objects:

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.

The pandemic that struck the world in 2020 made everyone follow the news and the numbers that involve the COVID-19.

Why don’t you take that opportunity to create something simple and pleasant, to follow the number of vaccinations worldwide?

To face this challenge, I'm using the data provided by Our World in Data - Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems.

They have a dedicated repository on Github with the data of COVID-19, and I took the vaccination data to help me with my tracker.

It seems to me that for some reason this didn't make its way to the official documentation
and seems to be rather unknown though implemented already in IRIS 2020.1

Thanks to @Dan Pasco I got a hint on the classes involved.
I used the recommended sequence of how to use it.
it is all directly taken from Class Reference and I just collected it to create a first overview.

Using the IRIS native API for Node.JS was the opportunity to present
a MicroService operating in a Docker container.
A demo video is now also available to watch the demo in operation.

In this 3-part series of articles, is shown how you can use IAM to simply add security, according to OAuth 2.0 standards, to a previously unauthenticated service deployed in IRIS.

In the first part, was provided some OAuth 2.0 background together with some IRIS and IAM initial definitions and configurations in order to facilitate the understanding of the whole process of securing your services.

Intro

For many in today's interoperability landscape, REST reigns supreme. With the overabundance of tools and approaches to REST API development, what tools do you choose and what do you need to plan for before writing any code?
This article focuses on design patterns and considerations that allow you to build highly robust, adaptive, and consistent REST APIs. Viable approaches to challenges of CORS support and authentication management will be discussed, along with various tips and tricks and best tools for all stages of REST API development. Learn about the open-source REST APIs available for InterSystems IRIS Data Platform and how they tackle the challenge of ever-increasing API complexity.
The article is a write-up for a recent webinar on the same topic.

Introduction

Since version 2019.2, InterSystems IRIS has provided their Native API for Python as a high-performance data access method. The Native API allows you to directly interact with the native IRIS data structure.