#API

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:

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.

This is a coding example working on IRIS 2020.2
It is also NOT serviced by InterSystems Support !   

The demo is based on the raw class descriptions.
The data classes used are Address, Person, Employee, Company
For a more attractive demo, a JSONtoString method by ID was added.

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.

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:

I have Mac OSX and Docker Desktop 2.2 (Engine 19.03).

I have a REST service running on my localhost (Mac) and I was trying to consume it from IRIS running in a Docker container.

If you try something like that don't use localhost as HTTP Server setting (using a Business Operation for example).

You have to use host.docker.internal.

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.

This quick guide shows how to serve HTTPS requests with InterSystems API Management. Advantage here is that you have your certs on one separated server and you don't need to configure each backend web-server separately.

Here's how:

1. Buy the domain name.

2. Adjust DNS records from your domain to the IAM IP address.

3. Generate HTTPS certificate and private key. I use Let's Encrypt - it's free.

4. Start IAM if you didn't already.

5. Send this request to IAM:

The following steps show you how to display a sample list of metrics available from the /api/monitor service.

In the last post, I gave an overview of the service that exposes IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. The post shows how to set up and run IRIS preview release 2019.4 in a container and then list the metrics.

This post assumes you have Docker installed. If not, go and do that now for your platform :)

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.

Some time ago, InterSystems introduced the concept of %DynamicObjects.
This feature is a powerful tool that makes it very easy to convert any string of JSON text to objects and vice versa.
However, in the work that J2 Interactive is doing for our customers, there are a couple of things that "need some tweaking".

PHP, from the beginning of its time, is renowned (and criticized) for supporting integration with a lot of libraries, as well as with almost all the DB existing on the market. However, for some mysterious reasons, it did not support hierarchical databases on the globals.

Globals are structures for storing hierarchical information. They are somewhat similar to key-value database with the only difference being that the key can be multi-level:

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.