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#API

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Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, protocols, and tools for building application software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication between various software components.

Learn more.

Article
Stefan Wittmann · Aug 14, 2019 9m read
Introducing InterSystems API Manager

As you might have heard, we just introduced the InterSystems API Manager (IAM); a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, enabling 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.

In this article, I will show you how to set up IAM and highlight some of the many capabilities IAM allows you to leverage.

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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 :)

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GraphQL is a standard for declaring data structures and methods of data access that serves as a middleware layer between the client and the server. If you’ve never heard about GraphQL, here is a couple of useful online resources: here, here and here.

In this article, I will tell you how you can use GraphQL in your projects based on InterSystems technologies.

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This formation, accessible on my GitHub, will cover, in half a hour, how to read and write in csv and txt files, insert and get inside the IRIS database and a distant database using Postgres or how to use a FLASK API, all of that using the Interoperability framework using ONLY Python following the PEP8 convention.

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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.

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In this article, I would like to talk about the spec-first approach to REST API development.

While traditional code-first REST API development goes like this:

  • Writing code
  • REST-enabling it
  • Documenting it (as a REST API)

Spec-first follows the same steps but reverse. We start with a spec, also doubling as documentation, generate a boilerplate REST app from that and finally write some business logic.

This is advantageous because:

  • You always have relevant and useful documentation for external or frontend developers who want to use your REST API
  • Specification created in OAS (Swagger) can be imported into a variety of tools allowing editing, client generation, API Management, Unit Testing and automation or simplification of many other tasks
  • Improved API architecture. In code-first approach, API is developed method by method so a developer can easily lose track of the overall API architecture, however with the spec-first developer is forced to interact with an API from the position if API consumer which usually helps with designing cleaner API architecture
  • Faster development - as all boilerplate code is automatically generated you won't have to write it, all that's left is developing business logic.
  • Faster feedback loops - consumers can get a view of the API immediately and they can easier offer suggestions simply by modifying the spec

Let's develop our API in a spec-first approach!

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Released with no formal announcement in IRIS preview release 2019.4 is the /api/monitor service exposing IRIS metrics in Prometheus format. Big news for anyone wanting to use IRIS metrics as part of their monitoring and alerting solution. The API is a component of the new IRIS System Alerting and Monitoring (SAM) solution that will be released in an upcoming version of IRIS.

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ObjectScript Kernel Logo
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:

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Article
Robert Cemper · Sep 14, 2020 3m read
IRIS Native API for ObjectScript

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.

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I am happy to announce that InterSystems API Manager is now generally available. InterSystems API Manager (IAM) is a new feature of the InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™, enabling you to monitor, control and govern traffic to and from web-based APIs within your IT infrastructure.

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Article
Robert Cemper · Feb 10, 2021 3m read
Using ZPM for Node.js

Inspired by @Evgeny Shvarov and his recent article
Deploying InterSystems IRIS Embedded Python Solutions with ZPM Package Manager
I propagated the idea forward to do the same also for modules in Node.js.
The case is based on my example of IRIS Native API for Node.js.

To anticipate the obvious reply that InterSystems IRIS supports WebSockets natively as a client:
This is correct and here is my aged related article with the link to the example in OEX

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Article
Dmitrii Kuznetsov · Feb 15, 2021 17m read
Four Database APIs

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:

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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
Eduard Lebedyuk · Mar 14, 2018 10m read
REST Design and Development

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.

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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 -

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Article
Niyaz Khafizov · Jul 27, 2018 4m read
Load a ML model into InterSystems IRIS

Hi all. Today we are going to upload a ML model into IRIS Manager and test it.

Note: I have done the following on Ubuntu 18.04, Apache Zeppelin 0.8.0, Python 3.6.5.

Introduction

These days many available different tools for Data Mining enable you to develop predictive models and analyze the data you have with unprecedented ease. InterSystems IRIS Data Platform provide a stable foundation for your big data and fast data applications, providing interoperability with modern DataMining tools.

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I already talked about GraphQL and the ways of using it in this article. Now I am going to tell you about the tasks I was facing and the results that I managed to achieve in the process of implementing GraphQL for InterSystems platforms.

What this article is about

  • Generation of an AST for a GraphQL request and its validation
  • Generation of documentation
  • Generation of a response in the JSON format
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Introduction

Nowadays, there is a lot of applications that are using Open Authorization framework (OAuth) to access resources from all kinds of services in a secure, reliable and efficient manner. InterSystems IRIS is already compatible with OAuth 2.0 framework, in fact, there is a great article in the community regarding OAuth 2.0 and InterSystems IRIS in the following link here.

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