Experience & feedback from online course "Hands-On with InterSystems API Manager for Developers"

With my basic knowledge of Docker container and REST API, I would like to have my first try on using InterSystems API manager to take control of APIs and microservices. I have completed this online course using my local IRIS instance as host (Windows OS) and IAM running on a Linux VM (guest).

If you work with anything other than English, you would earlier or later encounter the characters from the title or just plain ??????????.

Encodings are usually known, but sometimes you just get gibberish and need to make sense of it.

In this cases $zcvt is your friend, the three argument form specifically.

But there are a lot of options. So here's an utility script to check how the text would look like in different encodings:

When do implicit assumptions in code and arithmetic operators pose a real danger, and how can this danger be overcome?

Constantinople in the 5th century AD

(It was possible for people to build grandiose buildings and vehicles without the use of computers and robots 1,600 years ago.)

The article makes an attempt to demonstrate that Atelier is not just repeating the functionality of Caché Studio on a new IDE platform (Eclipse) but goes far beyond. Due to my personal experience, and challenges in former projects I picked first XSLT Debugging. Is it an ordinary task? Not at all. Who is doing XSLT every day? Probably none of us. Than why XSLT Debugging? Simply because there are solutions in our product portfolio which are using XSLT inside and those solutions require customization. Customizing XSLT without some sort of toolkit is more than challenging. The examples of such solutions starts with HealthShare IHE message, CDA vs. SDA transformations, goes through ZEN Reports, and ends by HealthShare CDA document viewer. Is that enough reason to spend time reading the whole article through not just the teaser?

In this article, we will run an InterSystems IRIS cluster using docker and Merge CPF files - a new feature allowing you to configure servers with ease.

On UNIX® and Linux, you can modify the default iris.cpf using a declarative CPF merge file. A merge file is a partial CPF that sets the desired values for any number of parameters upon instance startup. The CPF merge operation works only once for each instance.

Our cluster architecture is very simple, it would consist of one Node1 (master node) and two Data Nodes (check all available roles). Unfortunately, docker-compose cannot deploy to several servers (although it can deploy to remote hosts), so this is useful for local development of sharding-aware data models, tests, and such. For a productive InterSystems IRIS Cluster deployment, you should use either ICM or IKO.

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.

In this article I would like to tell you about macros in InterSystems Caché. A macro is a symbolic name that is replaced with a set of instructions during compilation. A macro can “unfold” in various instruction sets each time it is called, depending on the parameters passed to it and activated scenarios. This can be both static code and the result of ObjectScript execution. Let's take a look at how you can use them in your application.

This is a detailed guide to develop RESTful services using InterSystems Ensemble. The goal of this guide is to make you understanding the basic concept and building blocks of a RESTful service. The service is going to provide a very basic functionality (a “Hello world!”).

You will learn how to create required components as Ensemble classes, configure the run-time as an Ensemble Production and create a service configuration as a web application.

Here I’ll walk you through the process of creating a simple Node/Express API and connect it to a InterSystems IRIS instance.

I won't go into much detail about how to work with any of the technologies I will mention in this tutorial but I will leave links, in case you want to learn more.

The objective here is to give you a practical guide on how to set up and connect a node.js back-end API to IRIS.

Before we get our hands dirty, make sure you have Node.js running on your machine. So I'll check:

This should be an overview over a subject that pops up over several places in online documentation mostly as remarks and never as dedicated chapter.

Once upon a time ... No it's not a fairy tale.
In the beginning of Caché (and before) you had your partition to run your code. Part of that partition was a space with all your local variables nicely sorted by %,A,..Z,a,...z

Hi developers,

In this post, we would like to tell you how to take the most out of the Developer Community, to learn as much as you can from the InterSystems experts on the technology!

Pay attention to these steps to become an advanced user of our community!

to dismount/mount a database, use Dismount() and Mount() methods in SYS.Database class available in %SYS namespace.
NB: the database ID is its Directory

You'll find some examples of how to dismount/mount and check if a database is mounted (Mounted=1) or not (Mounted=0), and quickly see all the attributes of a database (via zwrite)

When you first start working with InterSystems IRIS, it’s a common practice to install a system with only a minimum level of security. You have to enter passwords fewer times and this makes it easier to work with development services and web applications when you're first getting acquainted. And, sometimes, minimal security is more convenient for deploying a developed project or solution.
And yet there comes a moment when you need to move your project out of development, into an Internet environment that’s very likely hostile, and it needs to be tested with the maximum security settings (that is, completely locked down) before being deployed to production. And that’s what we’ll discuss in this article.
For more complete coverage of DBMS security issues in InterSystems Caché, Ensemble, and IRIS, you may want to read my other article, Recommendations on installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for a production environment.
The security system in InterSystems IRIS is based on the concept of applying different security settings for different categories: users, roles, services, resources, privileges, and applications.

Users can be assigned roles. Users and roles can have privileges on resources — databases, services, and applications — with varying read, write, and use rights. Users and roles can also have SQL privileges on the SQL tables located in databases.

This article was written as an attempt to share the experience of installing the InterSystems Caché DBMS for production environment.
We all know that the development configuration of a DBMS is very different from real-life conditions.
As a rule, development is carried out in “hothouse conditions” with a bare minimum of security measures, but when we publish our project online, we must ensure its reliable and uninterrupted operation in a very aggressive environment.